Highliners bridge the biggest gap in Yosemite
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, 853-metre-long line from Taft Point west across a series of gulleys that plunge 488 metres. 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, said.
Highlining is high-altitude slacklining, in which a narrow strip of strong, nylon webbing – usually 2.5cm 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 heel-toeing from one end to the other while wearing a waistharness that links to a 7.6cm 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.
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 maneuvering through countless tree branches.
It all came together at sunset June 10: The line was set, the brothers were ready and the honour was theirs.
Daniel, 23, walked the line first and fell three or four times in the wind but made it across.
Then Moises, also falling twice but catching himself on the line above the craggy landscape.
Friends took turns on the line for four days afterward, most of them falling as well.
Eventually, Moises walked the line in 37 minutes without a fall.
So did fellow highliner Eugen Cepoi, Moises’ mentor.