From carrier bag to blast-proof office in a year

Sun's out and water's dripping off everything like the whole quarry just emerged from the sea. Unreal. The lake is clear as a bell, blanket weed and crazy creatures dancing down there in some strange world we hardly look at. On the cliffs there's new stuff growing and all kind of birds have moved in for 2010. Canada geese use the lakeshore as the panoramic toilet on the set of their nature movie and we have baby ducks on the pond. Baby somethings anyway.

A whole year just ripped past - terrifying, confusing, hilarious, funny, sad and beautiful. Never boring, always scary. New faces here, old faces a year wiser and stronger. Now, I work in an blast-proof office surrounded by invoices and emails. This time last year I lived in a caravan and kept the paperwork in a carrier bag. I'm not sure which one I like more. The grass is always greener......

I got hurt pretty bad in February and walk round carrying the pain like a monkey on my back - makes me a little ball of misery thinking I can hide it from everyone and it's busines as usual. Just starting treatment today at the sports injuries clinic- that's a joke: I'm so far from sports right now I'm not even in the stadium. Pain makes you stronger, right? Don't think so. Pain gets managed like a motor running hot or a slow puncture. Never turn your back on it.

Simple!

Archive: Mon 23 Nov 2009

Simple? you have to be kidding!

Anyway, there we were in the cold and rain and I was still none the wiser. Mystified I watched as Brian borrowed a chainsaw and lurched off into some scrub at the top of the cliff. Several sorry looking bushes later the chain flew off "don't worry, I've got an up to date chainsaw ticket" He said, and hit the kill switch. "It's gonna go from here all the way down there see" right.

Down the bottom it was much the same story but no chainsaw. Still none the wiser we talked about handing over a deposit, Brian rolled up his sleeves and went to work. I slipped off to figure out how to get the money to pay for all this. Lots of huffing and puffing in the Quarry, lots of fast talking on my mobile in the garden.

Eventually I had a plan:

"Darling, you know our mortgage isn't all that big when you think about it?"

My plan was to wing it from there.

" Ok but if you screw this one up and lose the house I'm gone"

Hmmm....

Back to Cornwall with the loot ASAP. Even patient, understanding, inspired and inspiring Brian had by this stage started to run low on goodwill but I got the first payment in just in time to realise we now had to drag the cables across the lake...

Rain

Archive: Sat 23 May 2009

Rain rain rain. No let up. Rain.
Every one got caught out this time, even the farmers.

Everything. Is. Wet.

On the bright side the lake is full and the people keep turning up: full on holiday season now with the car park rammo and our working lives filled with amazing crazy people from far and wide all wanting to jump off the cliff. I love it.

We get to see kids running up to the viewing deck and then stopping dead in their tracks when they see the view right across the lake. Gets them every time. From reception you see the childrens faces in profile as they leg it up the ramp. Hilarious.

How much more rain can there be up there? It's August and still raining - can't really get my head round that at all. We have uniform T shirts now, yellow or black. I think they look really swish but then I would wouldn't I? They've had a good soaking since we got them. The Zip Crew are out in the weather all the time, it gets good and windy on the launch deck and if you get soaked uo there you can get cold really quick. When your fingers get cold it's hard to open the karabiners, we use trilocks that are so safe it's hard to get them open anyway, let alone when you're cold. You have to lift, rotate and then pull back the gate to open the karibiner and when you let go the sprung gaet snaps shut. We use them all the way through the system for people, and use conventional screwgates for everything else.

It's working well.

Where

Archive: Mon 15 Jun 2009

Did a lot of net searches, youtube, everything.

Had a look at the videos, looked at the big ones in South Africa and France. Amazing, awesome even.

What I was trying to figure out was how to land people at the right place in one piece, give them the longest steepest fastest possible ride in the space available. The landing/stopping methods used by the competition were really not going to work on the scale needed to make this rock. I checked out platforms that swung out, raised up, static platforms, rollers, sandpits. Some places lower you onto the ground, some zipwires let you do it yourself. Some of them have a landing like a train hitting the buffers, others seemed really slow.

Anyway Enter Brian Phelps from Vertigo Pursuits. He had the answers. He said "don't worry, this is going to be amazing". During the site visits with Brian I realized firstly that I had no idea how to do it and secondly that I wanted him to build it. Until then I had been thinking that I could do lots of research and then sling it up myself.

Hmmmmmmm.

In retrospect I'm really glad I ran into Him. It might seem obvious now but we had to figure out where to put it. I wanted to cross the quarry void at a diagonal and stretch further over the Hoverworld flying field, Brian had other Ideas. "You got to think out how to get them off at the bottom" he said. Christ, I was thinking of nothing else. He saw what I had missed: the ground underneath the old access road rises up at the same sort of angle as the cable would as it swung back up from the lake to the lower (cliff) anchor points. Simple.

Fast Forward 2009

Archive: Sat 23 May 2009

Just got married: 10 years, 3 kids and now rings. We went away for 3 nights on our own, no computer, no calls, no children. Our third break together in 10 years. Magic.

Adrenalin Quarry now has a life (and a mind) of it's own, we have a great team but most of all it's the people who walk through the door: they love it and it shows.

It's built, open, working. I have to pinch myself sometimes just to make sure it's real. The vegetation on the cliffs and around the Quarry is lush, rampant, out of control. Every colour you can think of bursts out of the cliffs when the sun comes out, everything in blossom at once. We'll have to trim the growth close to the North Cable as green leaves almost reach the feet of riders on The Zip as they barrel off the launch platform into clear air. God I Love it.

The Lake is teeming with life, mad with it. Teeny little strange wiggly creatures bomb around the shore up to their teeny strange creature business. Mad weed hanging off the Buoy ropes marking the safe edge of the hovercraft runs, seabirds, ducks, you name it we got it. Canada geese, rabbits (not usually in the lake), buzzards, peregrines. They all seem unfazed by the hovercraft, apparently it's because the machines make very little wake. I think it's because ducks like hovercraft.

You may as well start at the bottom

Archive: Thu 14 May 2009

Early Autumn 2007 and I’m in a bed at Redlands Hospital, Bristol, wondering what happened. I can hear the Talking Heads “ this is not my beautiful life, this is not my beautiful car….” in my head but I can’t remember the name of the song. That bothers me not one little bit as I have other fish to fry: Jessie was there when I came round from my double discectomy and spinal fusion and asked me to wiggle my toes and they moved. Bliss. I went back to sleep smiling.

There is a gap of a couple of months, painkillers and drinking mostly, not a good look for a man with two kids and another on the way. I wore a plastic collar to hold my head on while new bone grew through the two titanium cages in my neck. The amazing Mr Porter put them in to me and filled them with bone dust that he removed with a grinder from the vertebrae behind my voice box.

Anyway I was a mess and needed to get better quick because I had plans and the clock was ticking louder than ever. Mr Porter told me that it was a good job but the fix wouldn’t last forever and that I should get on with my life. That kind of advice really helps you get up in the morning.

For me, getting up in the morning meant getting strong enough to get back down to Cornwall 3 days a week and seeing some results.