If you’re searching for a family-friendly summer day trip, look no further than the Wild Walk, a network of bridges and platforms that takes visitors from the ground to the treetops on 81 wooded acres in Tupper Lake, in New York's Adirondack Mountains . The attraction, which opens for the season this weekend, features a four-story tree house , swinging bridges, and a human-size spiderweb. Charles P. “Chip” Reay (perhaps best known for his work on the IBM Pavilion for New York’s 1964 World’s Fair and Washington, D.C.’s National Air and Space Museum) led the team that designed Wild Walk, which took nine years to complete. “When conceiving the design, I let the forest describe the project,” Reay tells Architectural Digest. “You begin with nothing and you form an idea, then you begin creating out of that. It’s about art informing architecture and architecture informing art.”

Visitors will have the chance to walk 45 feet above the forest floor.

The master plan for Wild Walk was intricately mapped out with advanced 3-D–modeling software in New York City prior to being constructed to exact specifications on-site. The steadily rising bridges meet platforms at precise angles, and the platforms are supported by as many as 25 angled steel poles, all rising from uneven terrain in the forest. “The Wild Center was an invention in my mind of a new kind of museum that chooses to tell its stories with living things instead of dead things,” says Reay. To that end, families can spot flying squirrels and 72 species of wild birds in the treetops overlooking the Adirondacks. “I wanted to connect everything to the landscape, not to objects in glass boxes.”

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The Wild Walk reopens on May 27.