10 days after our monster-highline in the Churfirsten (537m long) has been taken down by lightning we still had the open project to make a rope jump into a highline. Specially for that purpose Marvin has bought a long rope. So we decided to rig another highline near by the world famous devil’s bridge in Andermatt (Switzerland), protected between electricity cables, so that lightning was no threat anymore and that the line was not blocking any helicopter pathway.
We couldn’t go as long as last time, as the slacklines are destroyed and we don’t have such long lines on stock anymore. So we decided to take marathon-webbing with half-marathon-backup and rigged a 169m-highline with 100m direct exposure. No drilling was needed as the army uses this area for their training and there are bolts everywhere!
World’s first pendulum rope jump
3 hours of rigging and we could start. Heavy wind made it really fun to session the line but it was kind of impossible to make good attempts. After trying to walk for 2 hours we started installing the rope jump. With 2 LineGrips held under tension a leash ring was blocked in the middle of the highline. There the rope for the jump was fixed. Marvin then slided back by about 40m from the rope-anchor-point with the other end of the rope fixed to himself. 3, 2, 1, JUMP!
Marvin and all spectators had a big adrenaline-rush. Tension in the line (standing tension with nobody on it was 1.3kN) went up from 3.3kN (with Marvin on the line) to 6.0kN during the rope jump. Everything worked as planned and Marvin then repelled down on his rope to jump again 1 hour later.
The race against the dawn
After his second rope jump the conditions for walking were getting better. But it was slowly getting night. But I thought to give it a last try of the day to walk the line. Because of darkness falling, I tried to walk fast. The line suddenly felt easy. Standing tension was 0.8kN now. Walking tension 2.2kN. 10 minutes and 40 seconds later I reached the end. Sat down totally under control. The longest polyester-highline ever walked! Everything without wind. Yeeeeahhhh „smile“-Emoticon Huge fun it was! And the next day I repeated the walk with a lot of wind. This time walking even a bit faster.
I then called the line “The devil strikes back ” as this time Zeus had found no way to destroy the line and we were well protected by the devil. The well-known “devils bridge” in Andermatt was only 30m away from the highline. Probably a good place to rig another highline 🙂
Main features of the highline
- Main-Slackline: Marathon (Polyester, 61g/m, 37kN breaking strength, 4% stretch@10kN)
- Back-Up: halfMarathon (Polyester, 48g/m, 29kN breaking strength, 6% stretch@10kN, PROTOTYPE)
- Length: 169m
- Height: 100m
- Standing Tension: 0.8kN
- Walking Tension: 2.2kN
Written by:
Tobias Rodenkirch is SLACKTIVITY co-founder and an enthusiastic slackliner and climber. With great passion and creativity he works on the development of new slackline material. He started slacklining in 2003 and founded SLACKTIVITY in 2009 while studying movement science.