Photo: Urban Park Rangers, NYC Department of Parks and Recreation
Softball and cookouts are all well and good, but now there’s an entirely new sort of activity available in New York City parks: A so-called “Challenge Course,” also sometimes called Project Adventure, or just a ropes course. Parks commissioner Adrian Benepe is unveiling the course today in Queens’ Alley Pond Park; with a climbing wall, a 60-foot-high pulley called a “flying squirrel,” and all manner of other things to scale, vault, and balance upon while perched high in the air, it’s the biggest such installation in the Northeast. Summer-camp groups will get the course Mondays through Wednesdays; on Sundays it’s open to the public. Other times, the city hopes to rent it to groups and corporations for team-building exercises. Benepe views it as yet another new tool for fighting childhood obesity. “We now have two mountain-biking courses, half a dozen skate parks, and an outdoor Velodrome in Queens, and our park rangers run canoeing on the Bronx River,” he boasts. It’s like some sort of weird, modern-era pentathlon. —Alec Appelbaum
