Brothers set record crossing large gap on a highline
SAN FRANCISCO — Two brothers from San Francisco say they have set a record for the longest highline ever walked in both Yosemite National Park and California, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Earlier this month, they and a group of friends spent nearly a week stringing a single, 2800-foot (853-meter)-long line from Taft Point west across a series of gulleys that plunge 1600 feet (488 meters).
Moises and Daniel Monterrubio, brothers who are training to be rope-access technicians, had been thinking about crossing that void for a year.
“Every time we’d go out there, we’d think about that line,” Moises Monterrubio, 26, told the Chronicle.
Highlining is high-altitude slacklining, in which a narrow strip of strong, nylon webbing — usually an inch wide and a few millimetres thick — is strung between two anchor points and serves as a kind of balance beam. Completing a line means carefully heeltoeing from one end to the other while wearing a waist-harness that links to a 3-inch steel ring around the webbing. In a fall, walkers remain attached, but they have to haul themselves back up to balance or shimmy back to an anchor point while dangling upside down.
The sport in the past decade has flourished into a culture of athletes, gear brands and sponsorships. Over the course of six days earlier this month, the Monterrubios used the help of 18 friends and fellow highliners to navigate their webbing through and across the landscape — hiking lines up from the valley floor, rappelling down from the cliffs above and manoeuvring through countless tree branches. Eventually, they had their anchors: a set of granite boulders at Taft Point and an old, thick tree trunk at the other outcropping.
“It was pretty intense and dangerous. But we made it happen,” Monterrubio said.
The group received permission from national park staffers in advance, he said. The longest line walked in Yosemite had been a 954-footer (291-metre) extending from Taft Point to an anchor east. The new line was almost three times that length.