World's scariest zip-line

A tour operator in Nepal runs what they claim is the world's fastest zip-line, a 1.8km run that drops 600m and attains speeds of 160km/h. Watching the helmetcam sections of this video actually made the blood drain from my face.

What is Zip-flyer?
Basically, zipline is a cable mechanism used for transportation across a river, gorge etc. In our context, it is a piece of recreation equipment consisting of a cable stretched between point of different elevations, a pulley, and a harness or a bar for attaching a rider, who moves by gravity. Zip-flyer Nepal also works with the same mechanism and is categorized as an adventure sports.
How long is it and what would be its max speed?
Well, its 1.8 km long and has the speed of 160kmph making it the world’s most extreme ride.

Welcome to High Ground Adventures (via Neatorama)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: happy mutants • nepal • thrills • tourism • videos • youtube

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bcsizemo

How about no.
http://losinfinitos.tumblr.com Haz 0

Added to the Adventure tag of my to-do list
http://twitter.com/MadelineAshby Madeline Ashby

WANT.
EH

Doesn’t look too bad, but that (buried) video kinda sucks (double Wadsworth Constant at least). The greenish rope appears to be a brake.
- sarahnocal
  
  I agree..first I had to mute, then fast forward, then I didn’t even finish the thing. Too much face and tongue. The video doesn’t give me any feeling of the trip at all.
Richard Dagenais

Maybe it was just Cory’s setup or the music but I was really disappointed by the video.
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Shawn-Goldwater/806673997 Shawn Goldwater
  
  Yes, it didn’t manage to convey any sense of speed. Not even that scary, and I am an enormous sissie when it comes to heights.
  - http://www.facebook.com/bharatgolchha Bharat Golchha
    
    Well.. you dont get the sense of speed in the video because you are 1000 feet off the ground…
- Justin Guild
  
  The description did oversell it. I expected an almost vertical drop with screaming and flailing. “Shocker Bro.”
snah

It seems so relaxed compared to all the wing suit videos.
- Paul Johnson
  
  well what do you expect?
http://twitter.com/mmmPi mmmPi

Scary? No. I’ve done a ton of ziplines and I always want them to go longer and higher, so this looks pretty awesome to me.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1584576741 Scott Rose

Scary, no. Scary would be poorly maintained equipment, and unconcerned crew. This would be exhilarating.

Second, you are 100′s of meters up, traveling at up to 160kph, what is the point of the bicycle helmet?
- bumblebeeeeeee
  
  It’s a climbing helmet incase you head is tossed against the ropes and restraints. Obviously not incase you fall to the ground.
- http://illustratorhints.com/ Jesseham
  
  To keep the bugs out of your hair…
- bcsizemo
  
  It seems about as important as the missing shoes part…
  
  -In reality it’s probably more for the launch and landing sides than it is about the actual ride itself. I’m sure it’s part of their insurance clause…
- http://www.facebook.com/bharatgolchha Bharat Golchha
  
  Helmet cam
http://www.edmstudio.com futnuh

Looks fun. Scary, probably not in the slightest – you’re too far away from the ground to appreciate the speed.
- freshacconci
  
  The scary is the height, not the speed.
stevecaplan

Reminds me of the recent South Park episode about how boring zip lines are.
- http://twitter.com/xtophr Chris Norton
  
  This.
- .
  
  Shaka brah!
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVzBRCPNZUM
Lyle Hopwood

Probably the scariest bit was the guy’s tongue. Leucoplakia? Thrush? I think he should get it seen to.
semiotix

This looks like fun. I’d try it, as long as every single person associated with it, including the shuttle bus driver who took me to the top, had a Ph.D. in physics with a concentration in metal fatigue.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Bus accidents in the mountains in Nepal are really common and deadly. You should be worrying about the ride up, not the ride down.
  - Palomino
    
    Exactly: with a goat, maybe groceries or fruits & vegetables to sale at the not-so-local market. Oh, and a wood stick for slowing down/breaking.
    
    http://youtu.be/7x8yuLu57aA
http://jeremyjarratt.com/ x jeremy jarratt

I’m sure that’s relatively safe-ish, but once i was travelling down a cable that fast i’d probably have a heart attack thinking about friction.
- http://twitter.com/davidlrattigan David L Rattigan
  
  “Safe” is good. “Safe-ish” is worrying. At “relatively safe-ish,” just give the zip-line a miss.
http://twitter.com/pishabh pishabh

I bet the ride up to this lame zipline is scarier on Nepals streets than this
Teller

Not scary. Expected something like that guy BB posted down-hilling his bike on the wooden ramps in – where was that, Chile? – THAT was exponentially more scary and a truly thrilling helmet-cam video.
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Shawn-Goldwater/806673997 Shawn Goldwater
  
  I sent that Chile link to some south american video game designers that I know and they flipped over it.
http://www.disoriented.net/ angusm

A colleague of a friend just died when the zipline she was riding broke. This one looks fairly modern and presumably well-maintained, though. Also, it’s in Pokhara, which has a lot of tourist dollars coming through it, so they probably have the funds to do the job right.

It might even turn out to be safer than getting there by road or air: Nepali roads can be scarier than any zipline, and the country’s air safety record is a bit patchy too.
GIFtheory

The 160 km/h claim sounds totally bogus to me. I doubt they have some way of automatically regulating speed so as to ensure you don’t suddenly go flying off at 100 mph at the end of the thing, snapping your neck.

Edited: the website claims that the ride is 2 minutes long, which would put the average speed at 55 km/h… so, there would have to be some serious acceleration/deceleration going on, which still sounds suspect to me.
- Boundegar
  
  Inflationary universe, bro.
- ideator
  
  That’s what happens with a cable hanging between two points. It hangs in a curve called a catenary, so you naturally slow down because the cable levels off (and may even climb a little) at the end.
- petz79
  
  55 km/h seems right to me. It’s not that fast (driving around town speed) and can be decelerated easy enough.
http://noctilucent-studios.blogspot.com/ Noctilucent Studios

Too bad they can’t afford someone with half decent video editing skills. Looks great in theory, but you would never know it from what we just watched. B-
andygates

Whee!
getback

Yeah I immediately had to mute the music too – really tired of yuppie bedtime lullabies.

While I apologize for digressing about an un-captivating zipline video…honestly, why do so many people like that type of limp-ass, doll-baby music?

The zipline track is in line with this popular, putrid pablum below, imho -

EXHIBIT A: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEsPhTbJhuo

…and do you see why this same style — from 30 YEARS AGO — seems more engaging -

EXHIBIT B: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZviYmTMpBXE
- a mouse
  
  What?
avraamov

sounds like turin brakes to me. surely the most nearly famous song-writers of the past 15 years?
Justin Winokur

Has anyone else noticed the lorem ipsum text on their site?
- splashu
  
  I would have but I’m just so excited that I can buy a small table for $10 or a candleabra for $3 as souvenirs (????)
  
  http://www.highgroundnepal.com/product.html
  - Justin Winokur
    
    I was so sure this was a spam post for a second. Then, I looked carefully at the URL and say that you were linking to the same thing I was talking about.
    
    Let’s hope they are more careful with safety than site building
- Petzl
  
  Saw polecat than took bankrupt good hillbilly stew, crazy, fancy and hillbilly heap rodeo, pappy. Thar range saw me him sherrif nothin’ shiney dirt, pigs sheep city-slickers everlastin’ shotgun driveway. Promenade catfight fart fiddle jiggly gonna tarnation, fence, what quarrel dirty, if. Pot grandma crop kinfolk jezebel diesel coonskin hoosegow wirey fixin’ shack good roped in. Reckon stew tax-collectors, grandpa tobaccee hayseed good wash tired caboodle burnin’ landlord.
  
  I would argue whatever points they lost for bad music and Wadsworthing, they make back up with the Hatfield-McCoy lorem ipsum filler.
  - voiceinthedistance
    
    Beats bacon ipsum by a country mile! Saved for a later date.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000444450214 Genre Slur

Cynic sez
Fucking tourists…
http://dougsamu.wordpress.com doug rogers

When you walk up the mountainside through villages destroyed by landslides, when 50 year old farmers who look 80 invite you into their home for milk tea, passed by a troupe of schoolgirls skipping, skipping like mountain goats home from school in the early afternoon, knowing they were up at 5 am just go there, and tourists have spent pretty much that farmers annual income on one hang glider ride over an azure Fewa Lake outside Pokhara, I am a bucket of sorrowful mixed emotions over something like this. Hardly wonderful.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  The most heavily touristed areas have the highest standards of living. You think that they’d prefer to return to a subsistence economy?
  - http://dougsamu.wordpress.com doug rogers
    
    Don’t go all false dilemma black and white on me.
Antinous / Moderator

Not in the least bit scary compared to the rope bridges in Nepal.
http://twitter.com/ZakSteltz Zak Steltz

The Mokai Gravity Canyon in New Zealand offers a similar zip-line that also goes a claimed 160 kph. The difference being that you are going down face first:
http://www.gravitycanyon.co.nz/activities/fox

I’m planning on riding that when I go to NZ later this year.
oldtaku

Canopy lines are far scarier, with things whipping by and under you at high speed. That’s too high up, and sitting position makes it even less scary. Yeah, I’d ride it, but there are much worse!
chgoliz

The scariest part of a zipline is calculating how well-set-up and -maintained the equipment is. When you’re at ease about that, you can enjoy the ride a lot more.
In the video above, I saw no evidence of a backup system the way you have with a conventional zipline.

The ride itself didn’t seem all that interesting. I think much of the fun is having the ride be over too soon. You just start enjoying the scenery and darn-it-anyway, it’s time to brake.

Yeah, great idea in theory, but I’d probably pass….and I normally seek out ziplines when I travel.
http://www.geekforce.com Hugh Johnson

160 km/h = 99.4193908 mph
There, that’s better.
http://twitter.com/teh_aimee aimee whitcroft

And then there’s Gravity Canyon here in New Zealand – it’s not as big a drop, but apparently it goes between 160-200 kph. I’ve seen people zip by on it – it’s FAST :)

http://www.gravitycanyon.co.nz/activities/fox/photos
http://burntheflag.ca Jardine

When I was a kid there was a summer camp nearby with a zip line. No helmets, no safety harness, no soft landing. It wasn’t all that long of a line but you held onto a pair of bicycle handlebars, pushed off the platform, then hit a tire at the end. That seemed more exciting than this video. I think they took it away one year though, probably worried about lawsuits.
http://profile.yahoo.com/5KDXOSBEPPO3YLPUEEF7FOIHGU talby0

Not nearly as scary as the one in Columbia that children had to take to school every day using only a stick for a break!
francoisroux

Of course we’ve had one like that here in South Africa for many years…

http://www.zip2000.co.za/
- http://theladyfingers.blogspot.com/ Ladyfingers
  
  Although we call them “foefie slides”, which is more fun.
CLamb

I’d like a zipline with a harness that lets me lie on my stomach so I could feel like Superman flying.