Welcome to the website for the Professional Ropes Course Association (PRCA). The purpose of the PRCA is to promote, enhance, support, and contribute to the ropes course industry worldwide. This will be accomplished by the development of user friendly standards, ropes course documents, and to define, document and outline the construction / operational practices for the ropes challenge course industry; specifically that of best practices. These standards may be used for course evaluations, insurance criteria, and professional development. Further, the Professional Ropes Course Association will provide ongoing development of operational, construction, inspection, vendor review, and training standards for the ropes course industry.
The Professional Ropes Course Association is a membership based organization which values the input and contributions of its members. A primary goal of the PRCA is to distribute clear and easy to follow materials for all to utilize. To this end, the PRCA will provide technical information for the end user organizations for the purpose of improvement and advancement of the ropes challenge course industry.
The Professional Ropes Course Association was informally discussed as early as 1994 and formally structured in 2003 with a mission to promote best practices for all in the ropes challenge course industry. The PRCA was created by the direct efforts of Steven Gustafson, in collaboration with other leading industry professionals to include review and content contributions from Joel Cryer, Wesley Hunter, Peter Martini, John Springer, Jim Willis, and Peter Smerud. Combined, this group of professionals have over 200 years of industry experience and provided programming for over 700,000 participant days.
This collective, and growing knowledge base is committed to providing the best information to its membership. As the membership base grows, so will the knowledge base.
The PRCA is the only ropes course assocaition to provide ropes challenge course standards for inspection, operation, construction, zip line tours, AND national instructor certification requirements.