ACCORDING to its creator, this thing is the closest a human being can get to skydiving without actually leaping from a plane.
From where I’m dangling, I’d say it’s closer to being Superman - with a hefty dose of Eddie the Eagle. It involves flying face-down, head-first, for a mile or so at up to 100mph down a mountain - eeek! - and then - yeeeurrrgh! - straight over a cliff, out across a lake and finally - thwack! - crashing into a powerful shock absorber a few feet above the ground.
To be honest, it requires zero talent; even a sack of potatoes could do it. But the exhilaration when I step back on terra firma is intoxicating.
This is the newest, fastest and, arguably, the most dramatic zip wire in the world. It’s also the longest in Europe. And this carefully calibrated, 1,600 yards, £600,000 washing line is not attached to an Alp or stretched across a fjord.
Zip World is strung out over a spectacular corner of North Wales within sight of Prince William’s RAF search and rescue base. It happens to be in the record books already for being the world’s largest slate quarry and the site of the longest industrial dispute in British history. Now a well-established part of the extreme sports repertoire, a zip wire involves hanging from a pulley that runs down a cable from A to B. That, at least, is the idea. When Boris Johnson strapped himself on to an Olympic zip wire last summer, he famously ground to a halt halfway down, an unforgettable display of human bunting.
In recent years, zip wires have become increasingly ambitious, though they are restricted by a simple law of physics: there is only so far you can stretch any cable between two points before it snaps beneath its own weight.
The two longest in the world, around the 2,000-yard mark, are in Peru and South Africa. But now there is Zip World at Penrhyn Quarry on the edge of Snowdonia National Park. It has clocked speeds in excess of 100mph and it’s in a breath-taking spot more than 1,000ft up with views across the Menai Straits and Anglesey.
Dreamed up by Sean Taylor, a former Royal Marine skydiver and jungle warfare instructor who grew up there, Zip World is so exposed that the authorities have designated it as an official flying hazard.  No sooner did it start operating just before Easter than it closed again due to the freak easterly winds created by our current alien weather pattern. The official grand opening is still on hold.
So when I get a teatime call from Sean predicting a break in the weather by morning, I jump on an evening train to Snowdonia. Mount Snowdon looks dazzling in the dawn sunshine as I head for the quarry outside the old mining town of Bethesda. All is set fair.                             –MOL