Ransom E. Olds died in 1950 believing that Oldsmar was the single greatest failure of his life. By his family’s own account, the loss was painful enough that they simply stopped talking about it.
He was wrong. He just did not live long enough to find out.
On Saturday 7 November, from 11am to 2pm, we are throwing open the gates at 423 Lafayette Boulevard to say so out loud. Free admission, free zip lines, and a town that has spent 110 years quietly proving a dead man wrong.
The Man Who Leaped First
In 1916, one of the most successful men in America came to a quiet bend of Tampa Bay to chase an idea almost everyone thought was foolish.
Olds had already put the country on wheels. He built furniture, invented tractors, engineered frost-prevention systems to save Florida citrus groves, and ran a bayfront casino. He could have retired anywhere on earth. Instead he bought 37,541 acres of palmetto, marsh and shoreline and set out to build an entire city from nothing.
The plans were not modest. Grand boulevards radiating out from the water. Parks and preserves sketched in from the very first draft. A pier reaching a thousand feet into the bay. Room for 100,000 people in a community founded, in his own words, on health, wealth and happiness.
Then the bay turned on him. In 1921 a hurricane drove a fourteen-foot wall of water through the streets. The bridges built in the years that followed routed travelers around the town rather than through it. One by one the plans washed away, and Olds went north.
A Town That Never Stopped Leaping
The people who stayed inherited more than streets and shoreline. They inherited nerve, and you can still read it off the map.
A town of fifteen thousand built water treatment and power infrastructure scaled for a city many times its size. It set aside nearly a third of its land as parks and preserves. It built an Olympic-caliber BMX supercross track, one of only a handful in the country. It drew global industry to a small bend of the bay, Lockheed Martin among them.
And it never narrowed those impossibly wide boulevards, because narrowing them would have meant admitting the dream had gotten smaller.
None of that was the safe choice. All of it got built. Storms came, because storms always come, and the town rebuilt every time and kept reaching. Olds’ dream did not fail. It changed shape. Grandness here was never going to be measured in skylines. It gets measured in a hundred years of ordinary people deciding, again and again, to attempt more than seemed reasonable. We went further into that history in this look at how Oldsmar got its name.
The Ground He Set Aside
Here is the part that still gives us chills.
On Olds’ original drawings, one stretch of shoreline was marked for recreation and conservation. Green space. Room to breathe. He never built it.
The town did. That ground is now the 400-acre Mobbly Bayou Wilderness Preserve, one of the last wild stretches of Old Tampa Bay, protected rather than paved by a community that inherited a sketch from a man none of them ever met and decided to honor it anyway.
A century after he drew recreation onto that land, it became exactly that.
The Newest Leap
In 2016, one hundred years after Olds stood on this shore, another man stood on the same ground with an idea most people called crazy. Joe DeRing was not an industrialist. He was an Army Ranger.
“I was sitting on my bunk getting ready to board a military charter to Afghanistan when it hit me,” DeRing says. “Why would I not leverage the leadership gifts and grit the Army gave me and bring them to the civilian world? Why not put teams, corporate executives, and kids through these same transformational lessons so they can apply them to their own lives?”
Inspired by Ranger School’s legendary Slide for Life, he imagined a place where fear was not something to avoid but something to learn from. The decision got made around a kitchen table in Northern Virginia: leave everything, bet on Florida. Every hand went up.
The difference between 1916 and 2016 is that Olds leaped alone. DeRing did not have to. The City of Oldsmar recognized something familiar in the pitch, which is to say a big dream, a stretch of shoreline and a leap of faith, and this time the city leaped too. We wrote up how the park actually got built if you want the groundbreaking-to-opening version.
Team Building Activities in Tampa Bay!
What opened was a zip line and aerial challenge course inside a wilderness preserve. Lines strung across Mobbly Bayou with riders flying over open water and tree canopy. Aerial obstacles between the trees. A thirty-foot pole rising out of the preserve floor with nothing at the top but a narrow platform, a target just out of easy reach, and a view that runs for miles.
Running through all of it, the leadership programs DeRing carried out of the Army. SOAR in the trees, EMERGE on the ground. Not an amusement park. A place that asks something of you first.
120,000 Acts of Courage
Olds drew this city for 100,000 people. A century later, more than 120,000 have come. They did not come to live. They came to leap, arriving as students, veterans, nurses, teachers, executives and teammates from across Tampa Bay and around the world, more than 600 organizations among them.
Most arrive believing they cannot. Most leave believing they can.
- A woman experienced the freedom of flight from her wheelchair, checking off a dream she had believed was impossible.
- A young camper found a confidence his family had never seen, and carried it home with him.
- Guests who had spent decades avoiding heights took the leap they never thought they would make.
- Teams discovered that trust grows fastest when people choose courage over ego.
Every day someone climbs that thirty-foot pole, stands at the edge and steps off into open air. We have written before about what actually happens in the head of somebody standing up there and about the two seconds of courage the whole thing turns on.
The Decade of Courage Oldsmar Celebration, 7 November
The Decade of Courage Oldsmar celebration is our thank you letter to the city, delivered in person.
It is a free community day honoring the mayors, city leaders, veterans, first responders, educators, guides and partner organizations whose belief made the last ten years possible. There will be food, there will be neighbors, and you will be invited to take a leap of your own. Guests can step off the Leap of Faith and fly the park’s two biggest zip lines at no charge.
“This milestone is a letter of profound gratitude to the City of Oldsmar,” says DeRing. “Every leader along the way has protected this vision and for that we are profoundly grateful. We want residents to look into their own backyard and feel proud of what we’ve built together.”
“Over the past 10 years, Empower Adventures Tampa Bay has helped put Oldsmar on the map as a destination for outdoor adventure,” says Mayor Katie Gannon. “We are proud to celebrate them being part of Oldsmar’s tourism history.”
The practical details
- Date: Saturday 7 November 2026
- Time: 11am to 2pm
- Where: 423 Lafayette Boulevard, Oldsmar, FL 34677
- Admission: free
- RSVP: free on the event page, and every RSVP is entered to win
RSVP free and you could win $1,000 in adventures
Admission is free, but we would love to know you are coming. RSVP on the Decade of Courage event page and you are automatically entered to win one of three prizes worth $1,000 in total: a week of Empower summer camp for one child ($500), a zip line adventure for four on a gift card ($300) and a year of unlimited paddleboarding ($200). Parents of kids aged 7 to 12 can tick one box to be entered for the camp week too.
Winners are drawn at the celebration on 7 November, so you need to be there to win. No purchase necessary. Read the official rules.
What to Know Before You Come
Two things worth saying plainly, because we would rather you know now than find out in the parking lot.
Zip line spots are limited, and RSVPs get priority. Three hours is three hours, and a harness takes as long as it takes, so the people who RSVP ahead of time go first. Forgot to RSVP? You can still do it when you arrive, right up until 1pm. Come early if flying is the part you care about.
The course has real requirements. Riders must be at least seven years old and between 70 and 270 pounds, and closed-toe shoes are required. Those numbers exist because the equipment is rated, they are not negotiable on the day, and checking them before you load the car beats checking them at the front desk with a hopeful nine-year-old beside you. Our participation rules are all here. Everything else about the day, the food, the preserve, the company, is open to everybody regardless.
If you cannot make the 7th, the course runs year round.
Come Take the Leap
Olds never saw the preserve. He never saw the parks, or the boulevards still holding their line, or the crowd he planned for finally arrive. He never saw a woman fly from her wheelchair over the water he once tried to tame. He died certain he had failed here.
Every day now, on the ground he set aside, somebody stands at the edge, breathes deep and jumps anyway.
On 7 November, come do the same. The Decade of Courage Oldsmar celebration is free, it is yours, and it has been a hundred and ten years in the making.
