They don't care if the "water's warm enough." They aren't afraid of heights. And they sure as heck ain't sweating skinned knees or a mouthful of iffy river water. They are the Rope Swingers. And they are as much a part of summer as broken flip-flops and being nice to your neighbor 'cause he has a pool.

Most of us still hold the sensation of our first rope swing deep in our bowels, filed somewhere between roller coaster and cliff jump. If somebody else rigs the thing, your job as a rope swinger's pretty straight-up: hold your own weight for a hot minute; let go at the right time; try to hit the water in a way that does not encourage drowning. On the global scale of difficulty, it's harder than, say, ferreting out the source of the heinous smell in your fridge yet easier than becoming a master falconer.

Given the low barrier to entry, it's a riot: Adrenaline-charged. Primal. Tap into your inner Tarzan, right? But then we're talking garden variety rope swing here… the five or 10-foot drop into the drink with perhaps some minor nuisances (bushes, branches) to dodge on the way down. Before the advent of YouTube, most of the more serious rope swings out there were known only to the fistful of people who set them up. And they usually involved Duck Dynasty lookalikes from well below the Mason-Dixon line or trustafarian Phish fans with rock climbing chops and a tad too much kale on the brain. See also: Bored teenagers in hot places.

You can make a rope swing that's tied to a rocky outcropping or a man-made structure like a bridge, but most of them start out with a large deciduous tree growing on the edge of a lake or river. Find the right tree, poach a decent length of *thick* rope from your aunt's boat-house, send the skinniest rocker kid you can find scurrying up the trunk to tie a million knots around the bough, fasten a few fat knots in the bottom of your rope for grip, and then send it. Or, better yet, let the rocker kid guinea pig it. This is what rocker kids at rivers are for.

The preponderance of rope swing #fails flooding YouTube involve everything you can think of but here are a few classics that somehow never get old

Types of Rope Swinging Fails

- Rope too long: Drag lower extremities down shale, broken bottle, and poison ivy-clad slope before plunking unceremoniously into the edge of the lake where the water is, like, a few inches deep. Footage gets shaky here as camera operator invariably doubles over with laughter. Exsanguinate mere feet from the water's edge.

- Getting caught by crotch on bottom knot and/or getting foot caught in a rope loop: Both lead to hanging upside-down above water and scared for one's life. Both happen way more often than one might think.

- Long rope...short attention span: Instead of following the natural arcing swoop over the water and letting go like a good monkey, end up returning to land, get caught up in branches, shatter shins on BMX left leaning against tree trunk. Mid-swing is no time to go all conservative on us. Go big or go home.

Rope swings are compelling in a way that more extreme pursuits sometimes miss - perhaps because most of us have actually done a rope swing or two.  Less than 0.01% of the population has tried BASE jumping and the wing-suit club is still on a first-name basis. So, while out fishing we might see a classic swing being assembled by rednecks that look like maybe their family tree doesn't have a whole lot of branches on it and we feel that ghostly tingle in our guts (or lower) and think: "Man, if I wasn't so tired/old/hungover/busy catching dinner/valuable to society/almost-guaranteed-to-be a first round draft pick for the Oilers, I'd tah-hotally go and backflip that bad boy."

[No. You wouldn't.]

But aside from the classic rope swings into rivers, lakes etc. that require only moderate cajones, a pair of trunks, and maybe a Tasmanian Devil tattoo and/or some dutch courage, an entirely new breed has come about courtesy of the climbing set (see "kale" above). A regular water rope swing is as much about the "release" as the pendulum in, right? It's a sub-set of swimming, essentially. These new Supersized rope swings definitely don't involve letting go, and do involve climbing harnesses, hundreds of feet of climbing rope and hopefully a friend with a PhD in knots. If one of these rope swings goes south, you don't get wet at the wrong time - you get dead at the wrong time. People have already died pursuing these big drops with big consequences. No joke.

You can watch two of the all-time zingers below. One from Moab, Utah off the famous Corona Arch and a 600-footer from South Africa that borrows a lot from bungee jumping but is still considered a rope swing/pendulum swing. You'll never look at the ratty ol' rope above your local swimmin' hole the same way again...