Moaning Cavern: Wild ride on a zip line

By HUGO MARTIN
LOS ANGELES TIMES

last updated: December 16, 2007 07:28:33 AM

VALLECITO - As I step off a 25-foot-tall wooden platform, a shrill scream nearly drowns out the high-pitched zipping sound of a metal trolley spinning along a half-inch cable above me.

Legs flailing, hair blowing in the Calaveras County wind, a white-knuckle grasp on a harness, I fly at 40 mph toward a tiny tower barely visible in the distance. A blur of trees, shrubs and hiking trails flies past my feet. It's all happening so fast that it's hard to take in. If only that annoying girlie scream would stop.

Wait a minute. That falsetto is mine.

Then it's over. Somehow, I miraculously slow down and swing to a stop, and I'm standing on the other tower, ready to do it again. This is a zip line, the high-thrill,

high-wire act that's currently sweeping

through wilderness and ski resorts, and once you've ridden one, it's easy to understand its popularity.

Zip lines can be built in a few months, they appeal to adrenaline junkies of all ages and are completely carbon-neutral, relying on simple gravity instead of internal combustion.

But it's the heart-pumping rush and high-altitude dread that I'm interested in. Eager to get my fix, I trekked to this tree-shrouded canyon roughly equidistant from Angels Camp, Murphys and Columbia to check out the dual zip lines at Moaning Cavern, a tourist attraction outside this former mining town.

It's a brisk morning, and only minutes after the place opens, a gray-haired couple are strapping on safety harnesses and helmets. Senior citizens jumping on the early-bird special? No, it's the owner, Steve Fairchild, and his wife, Linda, testing the line before the morning tourist rush.

Fairchild is a 68-year-old retired engineer and physicist from Los Angeles. He set roots in the Sierra foothills in 1972, when a friend offered to sell him a cave in Kings Canyon National Park. Fairchild loved exploring caverns as a kid, so he bought it and eventually snapped up four others, including Moaning Cavern.

Fairchild launched his zip lines in June -- complete with his own braking system (a series of weighted chains attached to the cable) -- and already he wants to add more.

The existing lines are 1,500 feet long -- about a quarter mile. The new line will be a mile and a half long, surpassing what's said to be the country's longest -- 5,400 feet in Icy Strait Point, near Glacier Bay, Alaska, which opened in May.

The zip line at Moaning Cavern lasts 35 seconds and reaches a top speed of 40 mph. At $39 for the first ride, that's about $1.10 per second. On the Icy Strait Point line, riders get a 90-second adrenaline flight (about $1 a second) that rockets over treetops at up to 60 mph.

Zip lines were first popularized in South and Central America. In the past few years, U.S. resort owners have jumped on the bandwagon as a way to squeeze a few more bucks out of tourists visiting isolated caverns and snow-deprived ski resorts. The biggest advantage of the zip lines: Weather is not an obstacle. Gravity operates through sun and snow.

In May, Tamarack Resort in central Idaho added eight lines that hang over the resort's ponderosa pine forest. Later this month, Heavenly Ski resort in South Lake Tahoe will open one, and in January, the Kapalua Resort on Maui will add 16 zip lines to its new adventure outpost.

No athletic ability is needed. In fact, no need to even hang on. The harness wraps around your legs and torso and hooks onto the zip line's metal trolley. The Moaning Cavern zip lines can carry a rider as light as 70 pounds or as heavy as 260.

On the line ahead of me, Balagi Srini, a tall, broad-shouldered native of Chennai, India, lifts his feet off the platform and flies down the line.

"Aaaaayyyyyyyiiiiiii!" he yells as he streaks to the landing platform. Now it's my turn.

A staffer wearing a safety helmet checks my harness and hooks me to the cable. May Lee, a medical worker from Stockton, is harnessed to the zip line next to me. She wants to race.

Bring it on, I say.

We launch at the same time. Treetops rocket under my feet. The wind blasts my ears. The canyon floor is more than 80 feet below, but as I sail down the line, I begin to spin sideways. My flailing legs ruin my aerodynamic form, allowing Lee to pull ahead on the parallel line. She laughs and shouts the whole way, beating me to the platform by several seconds. Still breathless, we sit on a bench on the platform and she admits that she was afraid.

"I was scared at the top; I'm not going to lie," she says.

We look up the hill at her husband, Kevin, who is the next rider screaming down the cable.

He lands in front of us, wide-eyed, grinning. "If I can get rid of my neighbors, I'd build myself a zip line," he says.