How Not to Rope Jump - Extreme Rope Jumping off Highlines!

How do you not set up a rope swing on a highline? And how do you get back up efficiently? Check it out on this episode of how not to highline. Hi, I'm Ryan Jinks, and welcome to my new garage. Today I am packed, ready to go to the Rostrum in Yosemite National Park tomorrow. And I'm excited to tell you how we're going to set up a rope swing. Okay, this stuff takes a lot of gear, so being prepped and packed well is important. Okay, so we're rigging the 300 footer, which goes from the Rostrum to the far wall. So we have to rig the 80 foot line to access the Rostrum, then rig the long line. So these four bags here is everything we need to rig both lines. In order to save time and not have to yard sale when we get there, the small green bags have everything we need for the people that are going to go to the far side. And in the medium green bag, we have my 300 meter Feather Pro perfectly flicked, ready to go. Once we rig the two lines and enjoy them for a while, then we're going to convert it to a rope swing. And that's what these two bags are right here. Then I have an oh ---- bag right here with stuff that I probably don't need, but I'd be screwed without it. And don't forget the water and the camping gear. Okay, since we're taking off at 5am tomorrow, I didn't want to load this up in the morning. So I have it all done, I'm about to hit the sack, and I'm stoked for tomorrow. Okay, it's 5am and we're on the road to go meet our team in Manteca. We got our team! Good morning! Team Dreams! Hey my brother. Oh, that's the new photo. Yeah, you don't have one for this year. We're all here, everybody made it, woke up, eventually, and uh, we're about to hike down. Oh, these are... Hey, what's up? Hey, Christian here is going to be rigging the 80 footer here at the rostrum, and here's a sneak peek of how you do it. Okay, Christian here has made a triple or quadruple fisherman knot on the static rope, made a sliding X where we want our master point, and now he's adding whoopies, girth hitching them to the overstuffed glue-in bolt there. Okay, so we have our web locks in, I am clipped into the edge, don't worry mom, and right now he's putting on a giant spiral, because this has abrasion issues. We're going to lift it up with our backpack in a minute. They sent over the two web locks already pre-installed, so all we have to do is clip it to our master point after it's tensioned and we like it, we will tighten the whoopies, and we're all done. Then we get to highline. Okay, we've got the 80 done of course, and now we have the 300 done. So we're going to enjoy this for a little bit, and then we're going to add some ropes under it and set up a rope swing. Dang, look at Christian, this is his first time on a highline, woo-wee! And that's how you climb back up your leash on the up bounce. So what's different about a 300 footer now that you just crushed an 80 footer? Well, 300 foot is like, everything is kind of swaying and so there's no sense of what is like still, so you never really feel like you're still when you're trying to stand up, and then you stand up and it's just a huge mindfuck. Awesome, well you did good. Good morning, we have set up yesterday, we're about to do our bag drop test this morning, and we'll see how it goes. Never be the first guy to jump off a cliff. Let the bag be that guy. Okay Chase and Mel, let it go, let it go. Watch out, watch out. Ah! How'd it do? I don't know, that's just, that was really scary. How'd it do? It's just a lot of rope going. Okay, I'd like you to meet a dummy. Hi, I'm a dummy. Our test dummy. Hey Christian. Hey. Can you explain how you're not going to die? Okay, it's going to be pretty hard to die it seems like. So, threaded through my tie-in loops and a chest harness, we have a bow in on a bite, with like a triple stopper knot, clipped to a steel locking beaner. On the main line, the one that will have the most attention, on the backup line, double figure eight, bunny ears, tied to the same steel locker. So I'm jumping on two lines, got two harnesses. Why is that tied off right there? What's that? Why is that tied off to that bolt right there? So that I can't fall off the cliff right now. So you don't have to jump until you want to? Exactly. And what's that backpack on there for? This is holding the extra slack rope for the jump rope, so it doesn't get in my way. You're not tied into the ends? I'm not tied into the ends. So, how much rope do you think you have in there? Uh, maybe like... And what's all that black rope for? The black rope is to haul me back up, once I'm down. And just in case that doesn't work, I'm carrying an ascender rig with a gree-gree, ascender and foot loop, a couple lockers, to jog back up the main line, and a hangover, to slide over, in case I have to get off. So we don't have to rescue you. That's awesome. And, uh, how do you know you're not going to hit the cliff edge? Because we tested it with a haul bag, full of rocks, twice. Cool. Sounds good. I hope it works out for you. Don't forget the helmet. Three, two, one. Woo! Yeah! Two, one! Oh! One. Two, one. One. My God. One. Ah! It was ******* amazing! Woo! We got down, we lived, we got de-rigged, and we're getting some food! Woo! Don't die. Okay, now that we made that look easy and fun, please let me tell you how not to do that. But before we begin, let me beg you not to rope jump. If you screw up just one thing, you're probably gonna die. I debated whether or not I should even make this video, but I realized people are gonna see a rope jump video and think they can clip a climbing rope to a high line and start jumping off cliffs, but that's not the case. There's a lot of stuff that goes into it and I want to overwhelm you with how much work it is, so you don't rope jump. Let's first start with the anchors. I did the traditional Gliding X with the Whoopie backups for both sides, just like a typical high line anchor, but I backed up both anchors, one to the tree that's on the rostrum, that really, really big, fat tree, and the other one, the rappel bolts, to go down the cliff, I backed it up to the three bolts that are up there. Redundancy is the name of the game. We made our anchors redundant and we made redundant anchors for those anchors. So we used Feather Pro as our webbing and installed it on the anchors with a web lock like normal, including the backup line, no frost knots, and it was rigged pretty much like a normal high line. The main line was pretty tight, so it had some bounce in it, and the backup line was loose enough that at the apex of the force, it also started to get snugged up. Then we attached two static ropes underneath that rig, as you can see here. Now these are pretty long ropes. We had a 100 meter and a 200 meter rope in order to do this because the high line was so big. Now it's important to understand the roles each of these ropes are playing. The main line's gonna be catching 90 plus percent of the force. The second piece of webbing's gonna try to help it a little, and then the ropes really don't catch a lot other than back it up in case one of the webbing's snapped. So each line is progressively saggier than the last, and all four of these ropes are through the rings that the jump ropes are attached to. Now before we move on, one thing I didn't feel comfortable with, with our horizontal part of our rope jump, was how every time we jumped, the backup ropes would go over our main line, and like, things are moving back and forth, which means it's, you know, the ropes are seesawing the webbing. There was no abrasion. We inspected it regularly. We went out there and checked it. It's just unnerving. So we tried taping it, but there's a lot of stuff moving. Things still flipped over, just like when you take a whipper on a high line, it happens with the backup that gets on the top. Again, there was no abrasion. It's just, there's, I wish I could improve on this, if I could do anything better. So after we high lined, we untied our leash off the two high line leash rings and added two more. And we felt pretty good with having four leash rings. So there's four things you need to know about this part of the rope jump, so we're gonna go over each one. Okay, number one is to stabilize the rings, because when you jump, they could be slid over left or right really hard, and those are the kind of things that could swing you back into a cliff. So we took one of our static ropes, and no, we did not use an 8mm static rope, this is just a sample, and we tried to tie it directly to the ring like this, but it was twerking it really weird. So we put this square quick link on here, and put the rope on there, and it only would move about a foot or two either direction. Notice the rope is still running through the rings. We just tied these figure eights, which I'm sure an alpine butterfly and other things would have been better, but stick with what you know, right? And this is technically a backup if the other three lines were to fail. So the second step is to attach two dynamic climbing ropes to the ring, and if you don't know you're supposed to use dynamic ropes, you shouldn't rope jump. Now keep in mind, climbing ropes are meant to climb with, so I don't think they're actually made for rope jumping, so therefore you shouldn't rope jump. But anyways, we used some dynamic ropes, we used figure eights with a tied off backup tail here, and then Velcro padded them, and then taped that on there so they wouldn't abrade in any way. Okay, so the third thing that we did, which is a little different than some rope swings, is we put a delta quick link on a pulley, and this is in front of both climbing ropes, and this tail goes to where you jump off, so we can lift up the rope that we pull you back up with. So you're not attached to it when you jump off that cliff. If you're a jump to your haul line, and it gets snagged on something while you're traveling at 100 miles an hour, it could rip your spine out. So instead, before you jump, we pull that haul rope up, and after you jump, we lower it back down to you, so we can pull you up. Now the fourth thing is to pad your high line from the rings, because this thing is going to go whoosh, where every time you jump, and you don't want it wearing down the same spot on the thing that's catching you. And in our case, our high line rings wanted to be pulled in one direction specifically the whole time, so we wrapped our gib and tree pro a little bit thicker right here, so it wouldn't come off, and that side just wasn't a problem. But don't forget, it was also stabilized, so it never moved more than this much when we were jumping. Since this is where all the magic happens, let's summarize it. We have the square quick link stabilizing it, and it's in the back of the system. Then you have the two jump ropes that are padded in the middle, and in the front here you have the delta quick link with the pulley, so you can pull up the whole line, which is attached to the climbing ropes, and has a spare beaner, so when it does lower down to the person, they can just be clipped in and be pulled back up. We have our two webbings, and our third backup line, and then our last backup line, which is the stabilizer. And all this is padded by the gib and tree pro right here. And here's a fun fact. Three ropes is a bitch. We tried using three just to feel better about the whole thing, but it's a lot harder to figure out if three are untangled when you're at the jump exit trying to figure it out. So, two's a lot easier, two's redundant, it's safe enough. And just so you know, it's a lot easier to rig a rope swing example in a studio than it is in the middle of a hundred meter when you're trying to keep yourself in place while handling all those ropes. Okay, let's move on to how to drop a bag of rocks. First of all, make sure nobody's under you. Climbers, people, because if it doesn't go well, you could kill somebody else. And if you do anything, make it redundant. So, we tied several ropes under our haul bag and actually had the ropes underneath catch most of the weight. So, the rocks wouldn't just fall out of the bottom of the haul bag if there was a sudden jerk, which we were not sure what would happen. And the reason you see the black rope going in this video is because the bag can't clip itself to the haul line if we were to lower it down to it. So, we just let it fall with the haul rope attached. You can see that if you were jumping and attached to that rope, kind of how sketchy that would be. Alright, now let me explain the A-frame or the big wooden X that you see in the videos because that's what we use to haul people up with. Now, it's not the part that hauls people up, but it's the part that makes the rope go up and then over because it's a lot easier to work with the rope at this height rather than picking it up off the ground every time. So, the trick with A-frames is to secure it down just like a radio tower and it can't be pulled in any direction that way. And we put our pulley underneath the A-frame so our haul rope would go through that and then we attached a protraction haul pulley near the tree and pulled people with a three to one because it was pretty heavy to haul. After somebody jumps and you haul them back up it takes a little bit of work to get it all set back up so the next person can go. Now, it's important to have great rope management when you reset the system. We thought it was good and then I jumped and the haul line didn't quite come down to me and it was a huge fiasco. Now, we have our ascender system but it's quite a bit of rope to jug back up and takes a while sucking up jump time so Scott ended up zipping out the 80, zipping out there untangling it. It wasn't dangerous, it was just messy. And when I got back up we made sure it was extra nice and tidy and this is what it looks like. Okay, so we jumped all day yesterday and really worked out the kinks in our system. The way we do our ropes here is to keep them organized separate and untwisted. Take them out of the backpack each time. You tie in after this knot and then you can, when you're ready untie that knot, lower the ropes just a little and then once the weight of the ropes is on you you just count down and jump when you feel like it. So this black rope here is what we lower and pull people up with which is going through our knot passing pulley here even though we don't have a knot in it. The yellow rope is holding it up so it's out of the way so we can jump that way. Alright, you gotta understand there's a lot more that goes into a rope swing than just what I can show you in a 20 minute video. But I tried to cover the important stuff so you don't die. But there's a lot of little things that help with rope management and abrasion on rock and how not to fall off the cliff while you're trying to pull the jumper back up and things to know about flight paths and trajectories so you don't come and hit the wall or another wall. There's a lot of things you should know about forces before you set one of these up. And I won't do this again without having a dynamometer with me so I can check the forces on all the points to make sure we're within a safe ratio of what the gear is rated for. But I'm really banking on the fact you're not gonna rope jump because now you know there's a lot that goes into it. So please don't clip two dynamic ropes to a high line and start jumping off of things. Rope jumps are 99% work and 1% fun. And the risk to fun ratio just isn't there. Therefore, you shouldn't rope jump. Hey, thanks for watching. But don't be an idiot and go rig your first rope swing after watching some YouTube video about it. Especially from a guy who doesn't know what he's doing. But instead, this video is to overwhelm you so you don't rig a rope swing or understand what you're looking at when you go with somebody who knows what they're doing. But until that happens, keep watching these videos and don't forget to subscribe.