Build Your Zip Line With an Eye for Safety

Just about everything we do can turn out to be a dangerous endeavor.  This increases significantly when we do certain adrenaline seeking activities like riding a zip line.  While building a zip line is easy, and riding one is quite a rush, a lot of times people forget to take a couple simple precautions to avoid injury.  These precautions aren’t terribly expensive, or difficult to use, it’s just that a lot of people don’t think of them when they build their zip line.  They just want to get it up and go.

To keep your riders safe on the zip line, you’re going to want to at least make sure they’re wearing a helmet.  This is a no brainer.  If you’ve build a particularly fast or steep zip line, you might also want to consider adding a safety harness.  This harness will not interfere with the rider, as they hold onto the t-bar as they ride down, but it will catch them if their hands slip off the handle.  It wraps around the waist and legs like a seat-style harness that climbers use, and then a safety line runs from the harness to the trolley.  This ensures no one falls off and breaks a leg or worse.

You also want to make sure that the end of the ride is safe.  This is where they’ve built up all their momentum, and crashing into the ground isn’t exactly the most fun way to end the ride.  You want to make sure that the landing area is soft, and using wood chips is usually a good way to do this.  You also want to make sure that the tree at the end has some sort of soft protection around it.  One popular way to end the ride, is to have the zip line go over a body of water, but this, of course, adds a whole new dimension of required safety.

Generally a how to guide will go ahead and tell you how to build a zip line without actually covering the safety.   Hopefully you take the steps outlined above to make sure no one is injured on your zip line.

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