Eight feet to Brigid Mander’s right, a 1,000-foot cliff falls away outside Moab, Utah. She keeps her eyes on the rear wheel of her partner’s bike as they descend the Whole Enchilada, one of the town’s famous extreme descents. It turns out, she writes, that the airy bike ride is tame by current Moab standards. The real business now is leaping off cliffs harnessed to a 400-foot rope swing and walking across canyons on a strip of nylon webbing called a highline.
Moab, where it started
Moab has been a gateway town for Arches and Canyonlands since a local named Lin Ottinger started taking visitors “jeeping” over mining roads in the 1960s. Today’s operators have built guided, client-friendly versions of everything: harnessed rope swings, highlines, cliff-top terrain in specialized 4x4s, and for the true risk-takers, tandem skydiving and tandem BASE jumping, in which the client jumps from a cliff with a professional pilot and a parachute. Skydiving and BASE carry real risk even with expert pilots; there is no room for error. Rope swings and highlines, by contrast, have redundant safety attachments and anchors set in the rock.
Faith Dickey, who owns Elevate Outdoors Guiding, has guided people aged 10 to 69 across highlines set over Moab’s deep canyons. Her clients, she says, tend to be active people, not extreme people in regular life. “Doing it together brings families and friends closer.” A Case Western professor, Anderson, backs her up: going through something that intense with others activates bonding chemicals in the brain, which is good for mental and physical health in a lot of ways.
| Where | What novices can book |
|---|---|
| Moab, Utah | 400-foot rope swings, highlines, cliff-top 4x4s, tandem skydiving and BASE |
| Queenstown, New Zealand | Bungee (invented here), jet boats to 40 knots, Class V rafting, the 5X1NZ: skydive, snowboard, mountain bike, bungee and jet boat in one day |
| The Dolomites, Italy | Via ferratas on World War I routes with iron ladders, a two-mile zip line at 50 mph |
| Chamonix, France | Tandem paragliding from 9,000 feet |
Queenstown and the Alps
Queenstown, on New Zealand’s South Island, is the birthplace of bungee jumping, tandem paragliding and commercial jet boating, in which boats with jet engines run upstream through shallow rocky rivers at up to 40 knots. Guided Class V rafting, the roughest water commercial trips run, is on the menu, along with the 5X1NZ challenge for people who want to skydive, snowboard, mountain bike, bungee jump and jet boat in a single day. The Dolomites turned their World War I battlefields into via ferratas, guided routes up exposed rock faces linked by iron ladders, and added a two-mile zip line. Chamonix sells paragliding from 9,000 feet.
The footnote in the fine print
Two practical items, because the 69-year-old on the highline is a client of somebody. Most travel-insurance policies exclude “extreme sports” by name, and BASE jumping and highlining are usually on the list; a rider or a specialist policy covers them, and it has to be bought before the trip. And a personal umbrella policy is the cheap insurance most active retirees do not own: a few hundred dollars a year for a million or two of liability, which is what matters when the tandem partner is the one who gets hurt.