I jumped off Taft Point, Yosemite

Just a few weeks ago, I solo rigged the big line in Yosemite, 291 meters long or 960 feet, and we did a brand new rope swing off of it. Check out how we did all that on this episode of How Not to Highline. We have been looking forward for years to rope swinging off of Taft Point, because it's such an epic view, it's such an exposed space, and the way that Taft Point is shaped is shaped very much like our rostrum rope swing, where you can jump out this way and swing in and not be concerned about hitting the wall. I don't actually think you would hit a wall if you jump straight down and then come back, because that's just not how science works. However, it does make us feel better if there's a lot more air around us, because it is quite embarrassing to die if nothing fails. The most recent development in highlining has been segmented highlines, and that allows us to link smaller pieces together for bigger projects. In my case, I always use 50 meters and simple sewn loops on the end with enobe splits, crisscrossed soft shackles. And what we do is we stabilize the rings with those soft shackles, some additional ones, and that keeps the ring in place for us to be able to do our rope swing. Whereas before, they would just slide all over the place and there was no way to keep them where we wanted them. So now with that new technology, we're able to do this rope swing that we've been looking forward to for a long, long time. And so we did a lot of planning and prepping, and what I thought would be fun, for some weird reason, is to solo rig the entire highline, which is, I think, the longest highline that's ever been rigged solo up to this date. And that's kind of a rubber ruler, depending on where things are at and how hard they are. This one was ******* hard. It was tons of Z-dragging. The gully down there is huge. Anyways, it's almost a thousand feet long. It took me 12 hours to set it up, and I was stoked and exhausted. It's 4 29. This is a cheese stick. I just finished. And I forgot three of the four leashes, but there's technically one leash on here, so it's rigged. And I started exactly at 4 30 this morning hiking. So from the car to being done took 12 hours. I'm definitely bringing friends next time. And we did that the first day, and then we did the rope swing the next day. We're going to show you a lot about this particular rope swing, but not rope swinging as a whole, because we have our other episodes about that in more detail. We have dynamometers on this jump, but we also have a lot more tests that have been done with different weights and different people and stuff. You can check all that out on our YouTube playlist under rope jumping. But here we're going to show you some of the details of this rope swing. So the idea tomorrow is to jump from the railing right here and just start and go boop, boop, boop, boop and exit. And I'd be connected to a split right there, which means my trajectory is out here and I wouldn't come back and hit this wall. I laser a couple things here and there, and I basically have to clear that rock there. So I have to exit exactly from this point. Yeah, you have to be pretty strategic. Straight down is okay. But if I jump from over there, I have to clear stuff. That's a pretty gnarly one. And I'm 55 meters away from my split from here. So my 70 meter rope will have just enough of a slope. Day two. I'm going to jump with this tire that I painted pink. And it's hopefully going to be the world's largest rope swing, according to my very shallow search on Google. The concept here is that I'm going to have a dynamometer attached to my jump rope. And then from this point, it's going to be attached to the tire and to me. And I am going to be tied in with the harness. I am rope swing. But it'll be around me and I'm going to be sitting in it, just like a tire swing would be around a branch. So yeah, let's see what kind of forces we get. Who knows? Nobody's ever jumped this exit before. It's a lot of unknowns here. And before I go, we're going to make sure we push the tire off first to make sure everything's smooth and we don't hit rocks down there. That's basically our biggest concern because we know the forces in the system. If you want to learn about all this stuff and how to rig it, you can go to Highline University on hownottohighline.com. We have tons of stuff on there. Anyways, how about we throw this off and do our tests? So everything is attached to the leash rings. I'm going to slide out on personal anchors. My first setup here you can see is the soft shackle double wrapped in that swivel and tape shut. And that's my backup line. And that is a stopper knot with the Yosemite finish just to keep it as tight as possible. Then I use a longer soft shackle here in the front and tape it shut. Now you cannot tape SK-78, the fancier Dyneema. This is SK-75 from gotomarina.com. It's called Blue Amsteel, ironically. But it comes in all sorts of colors. But the point is tape sticks to this. It does not stick to the other ones. Keep that in mind. But that's how I keep my soft shackles closed, even though I don't think they'd open. This swivel is from Amazon. 20 bucks. So I bought two and broke test it. And we got 45 kilonewtons out of a 35 kilonewton swivel. And that's why I am rope jumping on swivels, because it's going to solve a lot of our twisting issues. But you can see how this knot here is offset. It's down here, not going to interact with our other knot there. So this is a nice clean system. Because I'm jumping with a tire, I have extended this down in order to not interfere with my knots. I just extended it with a shoulder length sling girth hitch. And the idea behind this is this repel figure eight can go down, get lowered to me, and then I can clip this around the tire and it can be pulled up. Now, I don't want to pull it straight up, which is the way it would go right now. If, uh, if I left it in the pulley. So what I'll do is I'll attach the tire to this. Then I'll jug the ropes, detach it from this, and it's going to go straight to the railing and be able to be pulled up directly. And this way I am not jumping with a tagline. You never want to jump with a tagline attached to you in case it got stuck on something and stopped you. If you ever did, you'd have to use a small tagline that, you know, would break. I've done this before. I've had it attached to me. And it got snagged on a rock. Luckily it was a cheap polypropylene rope that broke the way this knot is fat right here. It gets stuck in the pulley comes down, get stuck, but it doesn't get stuck and stay in there. It's a really free flowing. Um, but I'm going to be exiting from the railing over there. And so we've already walked all of our ropes over there. Uh, so now I'm going to go attach this and you can see in our other video from the rostrum how I attach it with the two extra soft shackles on the Eno split. And then for shits and giggles, I pat it and that's what I have pretty ready to go. Um, so the ring is sitting on top of this and not my soft shackles. Okay. So we have finished this. We have the, uh, Velcro on here. So I had to take these off and fillet them open, put the Velcro on. And then the ring is, I put the ring on top of the Velcro and then my soft shackle is tape shut there and crisscross tape shut there. So this can not move in any direction. And then I got swivel number one, swivel number two, and my, uh, pulley accessory cord tagline system. So let's give you a nice, pretty view of El Cap there. Um, I, this is a new exit. It's never been jumped before, so we're not quite sure how far I can jump. So to play it safe, we're going to tie the rope in pretty much as short as possible. And then, um, after that we can always tie in longer and longer. So there's no reason to push the limits now, uh, because the ground, it's just really hard to tell with stretch, um, how far I'm going to go. And it's really embarrassing to die if nothing fails and your rope is just too long because you're an idiot. So let's try to play it safe. Okay. So you always want to make sure that you go second. So we're going to let the tire go first. And this accessory cord is how we're going to pull it back up. I'm going to stay clear of that while I push it. Three, two, one. That's pretty clean. It's not a lot of burning rope. That's good. Good trajectory. You never really know until you just jump. Let's pull this thing back up. So I'm an idiot. I came up with this system like two years ago and fucked it up. So this is how you're supposed to really do it. This doesn't work. The more slack you give here, it doesn't go down. So I don't know what I was thinking. We made it work, whatever. But, uh, the way you're supposed to do this is this isn't, this is vital, but this is only supposed to hold up the actual haul line. This is just never actually used other than holding up the haul line. This is actually how it's supposed to be done is this is the whole line that goes up to your, in this case, railing. And this line holds it up. So as you jump, both of these get pushed out of the way. And then when you're done, you just give slack to this one and it lowers this, this other one, because this one will just drop right down to the jumper. And, um, I was down there with the tire. I could connect that rope to the tire before I left the tire. Otherwise you just connect it to yourself and you get pulled up directly. Um, and then this rope is, ends up coming up into the loop and gets pulled up this way. So it looks like this after you get pulled up and then you can reset it. That's the most beautiful part about the system. You never just have one rope coming over into a pulley. That was dumb. We are ready as you are. So you're not ready. Don't try this at home. You rolling? And off it goes. There you go. So I'm about to rope swing on my pink tube here. Selectivity should appreciate that. And, uh, just ironically, a couple of weeks ago, I almost pink tubed, but that successfully went well. Um, I don't advocate for doing this, but if you do do it, make sure you got a dino for science. Wow. See that rock down there. Holy shit. This is a 60 meter exit. Good to know. Oh, I'm. Oh no, I'm spinning now. Wow. It's so much colder down here. I made it. Wow. That was really scary. That was really, really scary, but I did it. I did the world's largest tire swing. I think if not, it was a big one, but, uh, I got to start jugging. Hopefully these swivels don't make me spend more than I already am. But Oh, Oh, the dino dino 2.38. Let's see if we can get that 2.38. That is the, that's the force on some whips. This is just a, a gnarly whip. I estimate I was about 60 meters tied in because the Highline was 55 meters away and it was pretty direct. So my backup is probably, I didn't really load it. Um, it's probably like seven meters longer. So the big concern here at this exit at Taft is you don't want to hit, let's see here. You don't want to hit that rock on your way out. So you got to jump kind of towards El Cap kind of diagonal, um, because you are where like the connections over here. So the idea is that when I swing back, I don't hit anything because that cliff is further away than that cliff. Um, now I'm still quite a ways from the ground. I could be at least 75 meters. And from that wall, I did not get close at all, which was a concern of ours. You can see the tree that we are. Our Highline is rigged off of, but I can only turn around anyways. So the real concern is these rocks. If my rope was longer, there'd be a chance I would hit them, but I also jumped pretty far and I may have cleared them. But, uh, you definitely don't want to do rope swings that have potential for hitting the ground. If you don't exit perfectly, you want really clean exits. This is mid-October. The colors are gorgeous. That's where the hundred footer is right up there. You can see the, uh, 50 meter rigged right there and the moon right there. Oh my gosh. I'm just so happy. I should start jogging. Hey, Nick. Yo, how's the stabilization software on the iPhone 11? Let's find out. Oh, let's see here. And which hand? This hand. Why am I getting a hose? There we go. How's that iPhone 11 stabilization? Gotta make sure I don't hit that rock right there. I just got to jump down there and I get to go home. Um, stabilize? Yeah. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. I wish I liked to golf. It'd be so much simpler. So this is the view from down here. Now I just have to jog all the way up there. Oh, this is when I start spinning. Now that I'm home, I do think the swivels really helped. I do think there's some other techniques in order to keep the ropes from twisting around each other, but we're going to keep experimenting, keep learning, and we're going to practice some factor two, two stage rope swings, which will be a whole next level of rope swinging just here in the spring. So stay tuned to this channel in order to watch all of our progression in rope jumping. And we're going to start doing a lot more science with it and do a lot more experiments on how things work and how things operate. We want to test rope swinging off fixed objects like bridges, so we know how much more force the rope will see if you don't have a high line absorbing the majority of the fall. On my second jump, I got 2.6 kilonewtons. It's just not that much force, but that's also attached to a 291 meter long high line, which is absorbing a ton of the energy because the more kilonewtons the rope sees, the more stretch it has, risking you going down further if that's not what you want to do. Go check out hownottohighline.com. Highline University International is a project we're working on for a long time now. We'll eventually contain all the rope jumping technology and learning and tests that we've done within the school. So you know that we know that you know you won't die if you try doing this. And remember, please always go second. You always want to throw something, even if it's not full weight, off of the exit before you go just to make sure everything's working the way you think it should. And you don't want to be the test dummy. There's a lot of logistics in throwing off something and retrieving it. And so we got a lot of those ideas coming out in future episodes. So make sure you like, follow, and subscribe so you just don't miss anything. Cheers. Hey, thanks for watching. But don't be an idiot and try highlining without going with somebody who knows what they're doing the first time you go out. We actually have available now the Highline University International, which is A to Z everything you need to know before you go highlining. This teaches you how to use a highline that's already rigged. So let's talk about some leash management. That's the H0 course, which is out right now and available at hownottohighline.com. It's over 100 videos with quizzes, PDFs, illustrations, and it comes with homework and teachers that you submit it to. It's a very interactive online school. So you get to learn in person online.