Have you ever wanted to walk about the trees? In Denmark, you can. About an hour outside of the Danish capital of Copenhagen, there’s a chance to go not just into a forest but above it. The spiraling walkway is 14 stories high. On a clear day, you can see Sweden from the top of the structure.
Cool, right?
The brainchild of Jesper Mathiesen, this spiral walkway is the centerpiece of a nature park he runs called Camp Adventure. Mathiesen is a former Danish Navy SEAL. He says he feels at home in the forest and wants people visiting the camp to feel just as comfortable there. In Denmark, where a lot of forest land has been lost to farming, Mathiesen wants to help connect people with nature.
He says Camp Adventure is for “everybody.” As a matter of fact, “it’s for the family with the very small children. It’s for the old people who don’t work anymore who just want to relax a little bit and have a good time.”
Architect Ted Fogued designed the unusual tower with his team. It’s meant to stand out and blend in with the forest. The structure has an hour-glass shape to ‘respect the existing trees,’ as Fogued points out. Fogued drew inspiration for the structure from the Frank Lloyd Wright’s Gugenheim Museum. At Camp Adventure, it’s not art that he’s trying to showcase, but rather the forest.
Although the structure appears simple, it’s very difficult to execute. Sometimes, it takes a great deal of effort to make something appear simple, as Fogued points out. As for the structure, a raised pathway leads visitors to the tower so the forest itself remains untouched. The goal is to connect people to the forest without destroying the forest. It costs visitors about twenty US dollars to climb the structure, which is built from locally-sourced oak and untreated steel.
The goal of the structure is to have people walk through the top of the trees, providing a unique experience. It might have been easier to install a staircase and an elevator, but this would take away from the experience. Visitors seem pleased with the structure and often say that it gets them ‘closer to nature.’
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