I’ve mentioned the sport of luge before, but this is definitely taking it up a notch.
Not content with catastrophic crashes in the icy luge tunnel of death, somebody has resurrected an ancient sport. Even I must admit, as long as your tumbling rag doll body doesn’t exit the tunnel at least you will slide along at heroic speeds, and the paramedics know that sooner or later your inert form will skid to a halt at the bottom of the mountain. It saves them a lot of climbing up and down to shovel you onto a stretcher. But I digress.
The ancient sport in question is lava sledding. Now it’s not as mind-bogglingly dangerous as I first suspected, the lava is not glowing hot liquid, but rather in it’s rocky, sharpened, jagged state. So it’s only about 3 times dumber than luge. Yep, this fella is hooked on this sport and is trying to encourage others. Here’s the run-down.
You pay about $3000 for a 60lb hand made solid wood lava sled. This is probably worth every penny since you are sliding down what can only be described as a very abrasive surface. I would suggest that you do not skimp on materials here. You then find a mountain in Hawaii with a suitable run on it, made hundreds of years ago by similarly crazy people. You can identify the run by the littered broken bones and skulls of the unfortunates that used the run before you. To most other people this would look like the site of an avalanche, but for these guys it looks like a good time.
You climb this mountain of unstable rocky razor blades, with your 60 lb wooden casket in hand, and then lie down on the thing. You are wearing appropriate attire for Hawaii, but not for this activity: shorts and flip flops. Then it’s launch time, where you will reach speeds of 50 miles an hour on the serrated rocks. If you reach the bottom without falling off, your wooden sled is worn almost so you can see through it and will be on fire in spots from the friction.
What a rush, it’s poi time, kids.