3k By The Numbers

Late October of 2024 I had the opportunity to help an amazing group of people break the highline world record. The line was named "Absurdian", and while more reports will follow this, here's my accounting of the project by the numbers.

The line length was estimated at 3042m.

We were on sight for 10 days, and 6 of those days were spent rigging or derigging.

We had 33 segments of webbing, and over 90 double wrapped 3mm sk99 grogs in the system.

The static anchor was two large boulder wraps with redundant spanset chains, combined with two sets of three ground plates, each tied with a 3 point bfk. These joined together, passed through a redirect bolt, and connected to two 8mm whoopies going to double rings on the hang point. There were two more ground stakes on each side, with the inner two connected with a bfk to the rings, and the outer two connected with whoopies. These side plates were there to stabilize the a frame and ensure we didn't overload one leg of it. The hang point also had a stabilizer bolt directly below it.

The home anchor was four glue in bolts and two ground plates. The ground plates were necessary to make sure we had good anchor spread, and because it was hard to evaluate the size of the rock we were bolting into. The two ground plates and two outer bolts were each stabilized with a sliding x with limiting knots in spansets, and then each of those sliding xs were equalized with the inner two bolts (which were in larger rock) with another two sliding x with limiter knots. These two sliding xs were then extended with a spanset on each one, and connected together with a spanset quad. Two 8mm whoopies came off the spanset quad to the two rings on the hang point, and the rings were stabilized with two stabilizer bolts.

We tensioned the curtain up to 5 kN before sending webbing. We tensioned it on two equalized double Blake's hitches, and let it sit with 5 wraps in a lynx 4 with a double Blake's hitch behind on one side, and a double Blake's hitch with a clutch and then a figure 8 descender behind on the other.

Sending the webbing over took about 5 hours, from 8:00 to 1:00. Cary got on the line to clean it at 2:20, and the line was unclipped and had the first crossing done by 5:16.

We originally put 7.2 pretension on the line, and sessioned with pretension between 6 and 7.5 without wind.

In total, we had 1 send by Danny Schlitt, an additional 3 crossings, and 7 more who got on the line. We had 32 people total on site throughout the week, with 22 on site the majority of the time.

Emile was roughly halfway across the line at 11:00 when the wind picked up and he called for a rescue. The line got up to 17.8 kN with 22mph gusts recorded at the adjacent weather station. He had tensioned it to 7.5 just before getting on.

After his rescue while the line was empty, tension got up to 19.2 with 24mph recorded gusts. We started releasing tension by 2:30, and with high winds keeping the line pinned hundreds of meters to the side, we emergency derigged. We got back to camp with all of the webbing, but not all of the curtain, by 7:30, roughly 36 hours after starting to send webbing across.