THE BIG ZIPPER

On the 28^th of October Iconsult & Age Cymru teamed up to try and raise £1500 for the charity Age Cymru by doing the longest and fastest Zip Wire in Europe.

The Iconsult team which consisted of Sam Davies owner of Iconsult, Keiran Kendrick the Technical Administrator, Rebecca Brookes the Technical Resourcer and Ashley Sherwood the Candidate Account Manager along with the staff off Age Cymru travelled to the tops of Snowdon to take part in this thrilling experience which is the closest thing to flying you can experience.

Zip World has two ziplines. The Little Zipper is 450 metres long and lets the rider reach speeds of 40mph. This teaches you the very basic lessons of how to use a zipline: tuck your arms behind you, put them out to slow down, grab the staff member's hand at the end to stop. We were all nervous as this was our first taste at doing anything like this before, Yvette being especially nervous!

We all did it successfully and when finishing this first much small zipper than the one we were about to experience. We were all full of adrenaline and ready to take on ‘Velocity.

The big Zipper (Velocity) was a 15-20 minute long bumpy uphill drive to one of the highest peaks in Wales. Its 1600m long and 500ft high over a lake in the middle of a quarry. The view was incredible and judging it took us roughly around 20 minutes to get up there, we all knew we would fly back down there in under 1 minute travelling over 100mph, a little like a human jet. 

With our ridiculously looking red jumpsuits and our helmets and goggles on, quite important to have the goggles traveling that fast through mid-air, we were all ready to be strapped in to take on this daunting but exciting task ahead!

The straps on our backs were hooked to carabiners on the zipline safety trolley, and we were told to get into a "press-up" position. Final checks were made and the countdown began and next thing we knew we were flying through the air, picking up speed drastically as we went over the cliff to a perfect Birdseye view of the beautiful lake in the middle of the slate quarry, everything seemed to slow down at this point as we looked down from 500ft up, the wind blowing in our faces. We seemed to pick up speed towards the end before hitting the brakes and grabbing the pole which the instructor had hold of as he released us from the harness and our feet touched the ground again, Incredible!

After we all did it we gave a big thank you to ourselves for being brave enough to do this, and for all the effort we had put it to raise £1500.

We had a fantastic day and it was all for such a great cause.

We would like to thanks everyone that has and is going to donate to us, we can confirm we have exceeded our target of £1500 and raised £1792.00 in total which is fantastic news for everyone involved!