LAKE PLACID – For all the years Jen Jubin has spent at her family’s Cascade Cross Country Ski Center, she’s never been up in one of the ground’s trees.

Traversing the center’s 20 kilometers of cross-country trails, there was hardly a reason to scale the maples, tamaracks and spruces. For Jubin, Tri-Lakes locals and vacationers seeking a new kind of Adirondack adventure, that’s about to change.

The tree-climbing comes thanks to Bill Walton, the Cascade manager’s friend and new business partner, as he plans to open a zip line and adventure-based challenge course at Cascade Cross Country Ski Center as soon as this August.

That’s why Walton, 29, and a contingent of professional arborists left the safety of Cascade’s snowy ski trails and climbed the ground’s 2-and-a-half-foot wide, 100-foot tall trees early this spring. With the grand idea of making recreation a year-round thing at Cascade via opening the 2,500-square-foot adventure course, Walton needed to see Cascade’s forest 40 feet up – through the trees, rather than around them.

“I spent a couple of weeks total walking around out there, looking for bigger trees and figuring out how to design and lay out the course,” Walton said Thursday at the ski center. “I climbed a couple of big maples out there, one big spruce I climbed to the top of, wearing the proper equipment, of course.

“When you’re up there, you can see the other trees that are healthy, and the bigger the better for the course.”

The new business is dubbed Experience Outdoors, and is the brainchild of Walton after a multi-year process where he put his plan in motion. Finding an ideal location for the course was initially the most important part of the process, Walton said. Soon enough, that led him to his friend Jubin, 25, and her family’s center. Cascade’s winding trails through the wilderness provided the perfect wooded infrastructure of canopies and clearings for the course.

After the duo used several Starbucks meetings last summer to move forward with finalizing Walton’s planned lease of Cascade’s land, the ski center experienced a difficult winter for business thanks to paltry snowfall totals, operating at about 50 percent, Jubin said in February.

Looking ahead, Jubin and Walton see the business relationship as a symbiotic one that helps each and expands Cascade as a year-round “one-stop-shop” recreation destination just miles from Main Street.

“This is our answer to that, too,” Jubin said of the warm winter. “The environment is changing, and we are reacting by trying to chase after these eco-tourism solutions. It’s not due to the weather, but it’s certainly working out that way.”

“Jen and I have been seeing eye to eye; it’s been awesome working with her,” Walton said. “She has so many great ideas, and the combination of the both of us back and forth has been amazing.”

Walton and Jubin’s ideas include a two-to-three hour guided zip line canopy tour featuring nine lines, three suspension bridges and a 30-foot course-completing rappel. A dozen participants, wearing provided full-body harnesses, helmets and gloves, will be able to go out together at a price of $80 and $70 for those under 18. The course will also have a weight minimum of 50 pounds. For the first season, Walton has mapped out a course canvassing the lower right portion of Cascade’s trails, near the start of the Rabbit Run.

Experience Outdoors will also offer team-building experiential learning programs within the field near the Ski Center’s lodge. The team-building programs are adventure and outdoors-based and will have dynamic pricing based upon group size. Walton has previous experience with team-building thanks to his three years working in corporate programs with the state Olympic Regional Development Authority, and he hopes it will be something the conference and event crowds who pack the village’s hotels are interested in.

“It’s another way for these hotels to say, ‘Why not bring your business here?” Walton said.

Experience Outdoors will also provide guide services out of it’s office and rental space on the Keene-side of the Ski Center. Hiking, camping, fishing, small-scale canoe trips, snowshoeing and cross-country skiing will be guided thanks to the shop’s four full-time employees, including Walton and his best friends. They are co-owners Marc Doering and Emory Clark and Field Operations Manager Ross Logan. The group will start with 10 part-time staff members as well, some coming over from Cascade’s ski operations.

Walton said his plans have already passed the Lake Placid-North Elba Joint Review Board, the Association for Challenge Course Technology’s New York state standards and the state Department of Health and Labor. All that’s left is final approval from the Adirondack Park Agency, to whom Walton submitted a completed application on May 18. He said the course’s structure is non-permanent, “completely” eco-friendly and doesn’t include implanting hardware such as through bolts into trees.

Walton said the installation of the course would take less than a week through working with the AuSable power company Northline Utilities. Aside from that, he said everything is good to go, from equipment to the unofficial launch of the www.experienceadkoutdoors.com website.

Next to the side entrance of the rental area is a replica of a state Department of Environmental Conservation trailhead register. It’s an idea of Jubin’s where customers will also be able to leave their thoughts. When the first person puts pen to paper there, Walton will have achieved his dream: To bring to the Adirondacks something that previously wasn’t here.

“If people have exhausted all of the Olympic venues for a day, we wanted to fill that one missing void that they could do on their third or fourth day of their trip, and create something no one has done around here yet,” he said. “This town is so focused on outdoor sports, we thought it was the perfect fit for the Lake Placid way.”