A couple of weeks ago my wife and I took the girls to Go Ape, the adventure theme park near Grizedale. Go Ape is set in a forest, and features high-wire larks between trees, with the occasional zip-wire thrown in. It takes about four hours to get round.
Obviously for an attraction whose McGuffin is the precarious feeling occasioned by being twenty, thirty, forty feet off the ground, safety precautions are vital. You are given a harness with two (and sometimes three) carabinered points of attachment, and are encouraged to keep one clipped to a safety line at all times.
Now I am not on the whole afraid of heights, at least not per se, and for me Go Ape, if not exactly a lame experience, is at least not the thrill ride its progenitors might have hoped for. Part of the difficulty lies in the appreciation of risk and exposure. Once you understand that the security features - essential for any organisation which hopes to be able to afford its insurance premiums - have in fact made Go Ape as safe as houses, you are essentially paying a fair amount of money to walk from swaying plank to swaying plank in circumstances in which you cannot possibly fall. The only point at which for a nano-second you do really feel exposed is in the final few feet of the round, where you must launch yourself from a platform and briefly, exilharatingly, find yourself free-falling.
I found that the closest I came to death or being maimed for life came when old rock climbing habits kicked in, and - this happened a couple of times - I undid both carabiners at once. It's my second time at Go Ape, and I would say that the biggest single danger, perhaps the only one, was my own loss of concentration.
If I want to die from failure to concentrate, I can spend four hours crossing roads. That really is dangerous. And it's free.
