How NOT to do HIGHLINE rescues!

Would you like to learn how to rescue people in my living room? Check it out on this episode of How Not to Highline. Hi, I'm Ryan Jinks and this is Kyle Lovett. And we are going to show you how to do basic rescue concepts here in my living room to start the conversation here at How Not to Highline. I really want you guys to get involved, share things that you've practiced, things you've seen, and stuff that we can make future episodes about. However, we're going to go over some of the basic big picture ideas today. The first number one priority in every rescue situation, climbing, highlining, or just an accident on the road, is really evaluate the situation, the surrounding area, and make sure that you're not going to get yourself into a problem. Try to figure out if you can, if the line's not too big, and you can observe why Kyle needs rescuing before you're like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. When you don't know if the main line broke, you don't know what the risk is, you don't know what happened, you don't know if shaking them around more is a problem, you really want to make sure you're safe so you don't need your friends to do a double rescue when you get your ass out there and get stuck. The second priority is to go out there prepared. One abled body next to an unable body can only do so much. Now we're going to try to get Kyle up on his own hangover, and we're going to do like a three to one and try to like lock it off so we can slide him back. However, on the 200 meter line that we did for the Eno split experiment in one of our previous videos, we tried to rescue the bag full of rocks when we were done cutting the line, and it was hard. It wasn't hard to get it on the roller, which is what we're going to demonstrate today, but it was super hard to pull it back. So one thing to do to be prepared is if you have a tag line, a rope, or extra tail of webbing is to clip it to you and take it with you and have, hopefully you have friends there, to help pull you back in once you get Kyle on a roller. It's common to have one personal anchor and a hangover that's technically two clipping points when you slide across a high line, and that's okay, I do it all the time, but I'm going to be unclipping this to get down to him to work with him. And so you don't want to be on just one point hanging in the sky on a higher line that might even be compromised. So I have two personal anchors here, and what I'm going to do is recycle his hangover. I'm going to use what he has on him, and I could easily grab somebody else's hangover if I need to try to make this more efficient because I may not have to go all the way down to him if I have a hangover with me. And if you do Eno split connections where you have the soft shackles or quick links connecting 50 meter or 100 meter sections, then you have to have more of a Kootenay carriage to get over those knots. Yell for help. What? Help! Oh! Oh my god! Is it safe to go out there? I don't see the backup line, but I'm going to come get you. So I'm going to get... Let's pretend I have a rope attached to me so my friends can pull me back. That needs to be attached. I'm freaking out. Freak out. Stay calm. Stay calm, man. Okay. What happened? I fell and I hurt myself, but I can't get back up. You sound like a noob. So do not, if you want to keep friends, drop on your friend. Where's your head? Move your head. Help me help you, buddy. I'm going to go down slowly. We're going to evaluate our victim. We're going to make sure like nothing's like broken, like his neck or something, because you don't want to be moving people around too much if they're dislocating my shoulder. Dislocated shoulder, that's fine. So pretend I have this the whole time. This is spare rope and webbing that I found. It'd be nice if I had a one inch SMC pulley and maybe a brake with, you can use an ascender or the protraction, micro traction that you use to pull the line across. Anyways, I'm going to pull apart my beautifully tied soft release. So now I have his hangover. I'm going to try to get his weight onto his hangover without kicking him in the head too much. Just like a soft release, you go around and around and around, and it creates like a little kind of pulley system. Okay. Now he doesn't, I don't have to get pull him all the way up to where I'm at, but he definitely needs to get all of his weight on the roller. Me too. All right. Now I'm able to muscle this. That basically created a soft release. I'm going to just tie that off. So him and I are freely rolling together now. And I can put my legs there. Or now that I have two points of connection, I can take one of my daisies and connect it to him to separate him from me or to put him in front of me. Whatever makes sense for your situation. I could do that. But either way, the leash is loose and we can pull him in. Now, if I have rope, I would want to be on the other side of him. So my friends can more quickly get him back unless I need to stabilize him as we go. And then I would connect the rope. You don't want to connect to the rope to the outside of the hangover because then it's twisting the hangover the whole time. You want to maybe equalize two points off of here or build something, grab something, grab him, grab the leash, finger hitch it. You just pull that. There's a lot of options on what you can clip here. As soon as I can get this tail under you and I can pull up, pulling down is actually hard because it's pulling me up. Whereas if I pull the rope up, I can actually put one hand here and one hand here and get that extra leverage. This is the most inefficient pulley system that you can create. If I had another hangover, I could clip it directly to him and have a little bit less friction. So this is like worst case scenario in my mind for how to pull somebody back up. Now if I was to get Kyle onto this cookie carriage, what I did at the Eno split experiment is I think I tied the rope directly into here or you can do this and flip the rope to there and it keeps the pulley straight, straight on perpendicular to the high line. You just don't want it to be clockwise sideways because you've only put one side. But sometimes if you are with a person, it's not too much for your friends to pull you both back. They could just be attached to your belay loop here and they could pull you and then I can just wrap my foot around it and pull them with me. Now a lot of situations when you get to the cliff edge, ideally your anchor is not just on the cliff and you have to pull them up. You can do the same systems where you just pull, pull, pull. You have people pull up. You have aid ladders. You can make aid ladders out of spare rope that you have laying around. Something that can help get them up. In this case, he only has a busted shoulder so he could possibly help with his other arm. But if you're at a place like CRG where we did that experiment or at GGBY where they have the hang frames during the festival, then what I can do is once I get there is once we get to the anchor, I can slowly release him back down to his leash and he can stand up straight and people can assist him getting back on the cliff. When somebody is unconscious or maybe a broken back or something where they're hanging backwards, you have two major concerns. It is where the tongue blocks the airway and if you're like barely conscious and hanging backwards in a harness for a long period of time while your friends are trying to rescue you, it's not going to help you become or stay conscious. It's going to just, the problem is going to get worse and worse. So you want to get out there after you make sure it's safe, get them stabilized by maybe building a chest harness. I'd love to see the different ways that you guys do that. You can send me a video or in comments or Facebook to let me know. And once they're stabilized, you want to get them on the roller and get them back to the cliff. I really encourage you guys to practice rescues when you're out at a highline and practice with stuff that you have and then also work on a rescue kit that you think is best. More and more common now, official festivals have rescue kits at either every anchor or nearby. We did a clinic at Breathe where we tried to rescue people in more or less a janky way and that's so distracting. We tried to rescue people and then at the end of like this three hour class, we're like, what are these bags at the bottom of these trees here? And they were rescue kits. So we're like, okay, we're tired, but we'll give it a try. A rescue kit made it 10 times faster. They all had a good knee carriage, a micro traction and a little SMC pulley and a rope that's, you know, correct size. This is a little bit too long, but I'm going to show you how easy it is for Kyle to be rescued with a system that's ready to go. Kyle, I'm going to rescue you. With your rescue kit? Ow, my arm. Be careful. Hey, no, you gotta take me with you. There you go. Help. No worries, Kyle. I'm coming with an even more efficient rescue system. Thank God. My shoulder keeps dislocating. Whoa. Your arms are long. I've done this before. Does that untwist you? Which one was the bad shoulder? The left. Thank you. Ah, shoot. Beautiful. I'll just do it upside down. Don't do the whole thing upside down. That should be not too terrible because I can just pull it from my leg. Perfect. Yay. No, that's just a bookcase. But yeah. So you don't have to rescue people upside down the whole time, but you can see that you don't always have to lower down to the person, especially if you have what you need. I think we're going to have to rescue both these guys. Send me videos of things that you've done in rescues so we can maybe compile a bunch of rescue scenarios. A pre-setup system that you've pre-checked and pre-practiced using to make sure it's long enough is a good idea, as a couple of our samples were too short and that's kind of obnoxious. But you can use a variety of pulleys and microtractions or Grigris or all sorts of things. Grigris are nice because you can actually lower the person with the Grigri. Whereas in this case, it's a little tricky to undo the teeth on this microtraction. I've been hanging in this harness for an hour. Clearly, you're not going to get rescued in two minutes if you go highlining. Therefore, you shouldn't highlight. Hey, thanks for watching. But don't be an idiot and try rescuing somebody if you've never tried it before, if it's a real rescue. Unless you're the only one who can't rescue them, then don't leave your friends hanging. Seriously, you should practice this before you actually need to do it. So if you're with people who know what they're doing and assuming you do too, please set up stuff, rescue people, and film yourself doing it. And we'll make an entire episode out of that. Thank you to people who help support this channel with either PayPal one-time donations or patron.com $1 per episode. Every little bit helps. And those who do help get the Slack Snap chart of over 500 break tests done now and all the folders with the videos correlating to that. So if you like to nerd out on things like that, give that to people who get involved. Until you have a chance to rescue somebody in your living room, be sure to like, follow, and subscribe so you don't miss the next cheesy episode. Cheers.