Explore America's Highest Suspension Bridge In Colorado, But Only If You're Brave Enough

Surely by now you're familiar with the concept of "type two fun"? Type one fun is the kind you have on vacation in Aruba: snorkeling, beachcombing, and honeymoon canoodling. Type two fun is grueling, painful, or otherwise unpleasant in the moment, but is hard to beat for searing vivid memories into your brain, especially if you're an adrenaline junkie. Think climbing Mount Everest, backpacking the Grand Canyon, or running a 100-mile ultramarathon.

Well, a visit to Colorado's Royal Gorge Bridge & Park is something you might want to call "type three fun." It's not physically demanding, but it offers up a daunting series of psyche-out that challenges with an array of attractions offering dizzying, vertiginous levels of height exposure you'd be hard-pressed to find anywhere else in the world. You may blanch, quake, and flail in the face of these so-called "attractions," but if you succeed in conquering them, well, Evil Knievil will have nothing on you.

America's highest-flying suspension bridge soars 956 feet above the roiling Arkansas River. Built in 1929, not as a transportation infrastructure but for recreational purposes, it's a delicate structure: From a distance, it looks like it's made of spider webs, or spun candy, just a light armature resting lightly on the two sides of the canyon. Visitors walk across the bridge's 1,257 wooden planks to enter the park, past flags of all 50 states flapping and cracking in the wind.

When you make the 60-mile pilgrimage here on your Colorado Springs vacation, walking across the bridge is probably your main goal — whether you're excited or filled with dread. Unless your name is Alex Honnold, it's likely that you'll get some kind of butterflies looking down from a wood-planked footbridge that sways slightly in the wind. Whether this feels "fun" or not is a complicated and individualized equation. One Redditor described what it was like to walk across the bridge one night, returning from one of the park's many concerts: "After the show a couple thousand people walking across at the same time, late at night, had the bridge swaying back and forth significantly. I thought I was going to die that night." We like to think they're kidding, at least a little.

If the walk across gives you the heebie-jeebies, you only need to do it once. You can take a fire-engine red gondola across or back, a transportation method that allows you to squeeze your eyes shut like the Cowardly Lion in "The Wizard of Oz" should you feel the need. However, if you found the walk across the bridge not quite challenging enough, you can ride the Cloudscraper zip line across. At 1,200 feet, it's the highest zip line in North America. And if that still isn't enough to get your heart racing, try the even more diabolical Skycoaster. This is an amusement park-style ride that suspends you on a wire, swings you like a pendulum out over the canyon at 50 mph, then drops you into momentary free-fall. "Great ride for hard to impress teens," one Tripadvisor visitors writes.

The Royal Gorge Via Ferrata is a hiking and rock climbing course where you're always safely clipped into steel cables, making it a safe intro to climbing for beginners. It's only accessible via guided trips, which range from one to five hours long, and from gentle introduction to challenging excursion. You'll get to look up at the bridge while clinging to a rock wall, which is its own kind of thrill. "Via ferrata" means "iron path" in Italian, a term that dates to World War I, when soldiers used iron cables to create routes through mountains. As climbing in general becomes more popular, these protected routes are growing in number, and Colorado now has eight.

If you'd rather get your adrenaline rush from motion, rather than heights, a rollicking all-day river rafting trip down Royal Gorge will let you crane your neck to look up at those foolhardy humans dangling in the air above as you rocket down foaming whitewater over rapids with names like "the sledgehammer." This is no lazy river, but rather one of the most dangerous rapids in the world — you'll be wearing a helmet, and it'll be bright yellow so the guides can find you amid the froth should you capsize.

If all of these adventures sound like things only crazy people do, don't skip the gorge, just take a relaxing ride on the Royal Gorge Route Railroad, which winds through the bottom of the gorge with four daily departures. You can ride in an open car where you can feel the wind in your hair and the sun on your shoulders, or a glass-ceilinged dome car where you can stargaze after a gourmet dinner — no spills, no chills, only type one thrills.