BROTHERS SET RECORD IN YOSEMITE HIGHLINE CROSSING
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, 2,800-foot-long line from Taft Point west across a series of gulleys that plunge 1,600 feet.
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 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 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 group received permission from national park staffers in advance.
It all came together at sunset June 10: The line was set, the brothers were ready and the honor 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.
Friends took turns on the line for four days afterward, most of them falling as well. The pride of a highliner is to conquer a line without slipping off.
Eventually, Moises walked the line in 37 minutes without a fall. So did fellow highliner Eugen Cepoi, Moises’ mentor.