Latest / Adventure Sports Podcast / Ep. 1211: BIG Rope Jumps & Swings with Alonso Rodriguez

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Ep. 1211: BIG Rope Jumps & Swings with Alonso Rodriguez · Adventure Sports Podcast

0:06
[SPEAKER_01]: your listening to the Adventure Sports podcast.
0:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for adventuring with us as we discover what incredible athletes and outdoor enthusiasts are doing all over the world.
0:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Now here's your host, Kurt Linville.
0:19
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0:23
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1:11
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1:13
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1:18
[SPEAKER_03]: I have Alonso Rodriguez back with us, and that's Alonso with an S, I want to point that out.
1:26
[SPEAKER_03]: We were talking about Highlining, which is like slacklining only over vast distances and way up there, and we did that recently on episode 1184, but if you heard the episode you know that the last end of the episode got cut off.
1:42
[SPEAKER_03]: So I thought I would have Alonso back on, not just talk about highlighting, but he also, he does a lot of rock climbing, he does rope jumping, and he makes tree nets, and I'm curious to hear what the tree net gig is all about, so Alonso, welcome back the Adventure Sports podcast.
2:01
[SPEAKER_00]: it's great to be back and you know hopefully we don't lose the episode this time I'm filming filming in my house now it's not under remodel anymore rather than a Starbucks and I think that's kind of where the issue stem from was that you know filmed and then I left the Starbucks so didn't have Wi-Fi anymore and then I think that caused the catastrophe of not having downloaded the episode.
2:26
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, somehow the we lost part of it, but that's okay, you're back and you know, I wanted to refer people back to episode 11 84 walking on air is what we called it and it really looks like you're walking on air.
2:40
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, if you're standing on the ground looking up, you're hundreds and hundreds of even more feet.
2:45
[SPEAKER_03]: up.
2:46
[SPEAKER_03]: And the line you're on is so small and you're going for like a kilometer across this vast expanse.
2:53
[SPEAKER_03]: It's just one of the most amazing visuals that I've ever seen.
2:57
[SPEAKER_03]: It looks literally like you're walking on air.
3:00
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what it feels like and it's a super cool episode.
3:07
[SPEAKER_03]: Everyone go back and listen to it.
3:09
[SPEAKER_03]: The part that we lost, we're not going to try to rebuild all of this, but we talked a little bit more about the engineering behind it, I think, before we talked about the way that the wind would push your person around and
3:20
[SPEAKER_03]: Just for fun, Alonso, will you give us some of the stats on some of the really big lines that you've done?
3:27
[SPEAKER_03]: Just so people know what we're talking about, how long, how high that sort of thing?
3:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so me personally, the longest line I've ever done with my close friends, they're about like 10 to 15 of us over the course of a week.
3:42
[SPEAKER_00]: We put up a 1.35 kilometer line out in the Mojave Desert, you know 1.35 kilometers is like
3:51
[SPEAKER_00]: close to five thousand feet.
3:53
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like just shy of a mile.
3:55
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to say like 4800 feet or something like that.
3:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was, you know, well over 600 feet high.
4:04
[SPEAKER_00]: But you know, the height when you have a line that long, it honestly doesn't even matter anymore, because you're just out in such a big space that you just, you know, you can't even really feel the exposure, because you're
4:17
[SPEAKER_00]: So far out there that is like you said you're walking in the sky.
4:21
[SPEAKER_00]: We're walking on air So like it doesn't matter which direction you look you're just so far from anything That height just becomes like another thing out there.
4:32
[SPEAKER_03]: That's crazy It's such an amazing sport It's not something that you see a lot of I guess it's gaining popularity these days how people are doing this
4:42
[SPEAKER_00]: well man when i when i first joined the sport like eight years ago um so we actually we actually have a Facebook group uh it's called slackchat for anybody interested in learning more about the sport it's some it's literally we're like every slack liner in the world it is you know like anyone that has Facebook and slacklines they're on slackchat so if you want to ask about
5:03
[SPEAKER_00]: any kind of slack lining information like where to go, how to start, things like that.
5:07
[SPEAKER_00]: You go to Slack chat and you know they tell you how many members are on that page so that's kind of what I use does like how many people slack line.
5:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And I remember when I first joined it was something like 9,000 people.
5:20
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm curious what it would be today though that was like seven years ago.
5:24
[SPEAKER_00]: I bet it's doubled since then and we're probably at closer to like 20,000 people now.
5:29
[SPEAKER_03]: Well and that's slack lining as well not just high lining.
5:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, correct.
5:33
[SPEAKER_00]: If you, if you want to just take high liners, you know, we're probably somewhere between like 5 to 10,000.
5:41
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd be, I'd be surprised if there were more than 10,000 people actively highlighting like, you know, worldwide.
5:48
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't, I don't think you can count people that I've like tried it once or that, you know, did it like 10 years ago and don't do it and more kind of thing, right?
5:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Like active high liners, I'd say somewhere between 5 to 10,000.
6:01
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, it is a remarkable thing.
6:03
[SPEAKER_03]: I often ponder how humans will take any technology, any sport, to its absolute limits.
6:11
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, and we just keep pushing it and pushing it and pushing it.
6:14
[SPEAKER_03]: It's just in our nature somehow.
6:17
[SPEAKER_03]: and i think about some of the like i watch the red bull down hill mountain biking stuffed huge drops drops it would kill you if you weren't on a bicycle and it's crazy to think about how two wills in some rubber make it possible to do something superhuman highlighting is almost like that only i think it's a lot safer it doesn't feel safer i'm sure
6:39
[SPEAKER_00]: I was about to say, I don't know if you can compare the two, the bike one is definitely 1000 times more dangerous.
6:50
[SPEAKER_00]: I like to tell people that our sport, you know, it don't get me wrong.
6:54
[SPEAKER_00]: It can be very serious.
6:56
[SPEAKER_00]: You're walking on a piece of webbing high up if you do something wrong.
7:00
[SPEAKER_00]: You know your webbing break, so you forget to tie your leash, which believe it or not, is the most common cause of death in the sport.
7:07
[SPEAKER_00]: You will die because you're so far up, but it's one of those sports that has very low probability of injury, but the times where you do get injured or something like that, it's like pretty high consequence, you know what I mean?
7:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I call those binary sports.
7:25
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a binary sport, there you go.
7:27
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, it's like skydiving without a reserve, but you do have a reserve because you put up two lines.
7:32
[SPEAKER_03]: You have a, what do you call it some sort of a trailer that follows you.
7:37
[SPEAKER_03]: It's just, you had a word for it.
7:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The least, yes.
7:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
7:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, the device that's on the second line is what I was trying to, yeah, you have the least you have a.
7:46
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's actually no device on the second line.
7:49
[SPEAKER_00]: It's literally just two lines taped together.
7:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And the second line is rigged loose, so you see all the loops.
7:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
7:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is two things.
7:58
[SPEAKER_00]: So that obviously it provides backup in case the main line breaks for some crazy reason.
8:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Doesn't happen often.
8:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want people to think in that, you know, a main line failure and highlighting is as common as, like,
8:11
[SPEAKER_00]: main parachute failure and skydiving, right?
8:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are two very different things.
8:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, like if we when you hear people will have in their main parachutes fail and skydiving, they're just kind of like laugh about it and they're like Oh, they're reserved work good good for you, you know, but like when we have a main lane failure and highlighting it's a very big issue It's not like something
8:32
[SPEAKER_00]: that just kind of gets like, well, the backup caught you.
8:35
[SPEAKER_00]: You're good, you know?
8:37
[SPEAKER_00]: No, no, like it.
8:38
[SPEAKER_00]: We, we don't like to use our backups, but they're there for when we need.
8:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Have you ever had a line break while you're on it?
8:46
[SPEAKER_00]: I have had a line break actually, but we made a very dumb and hindsight decision.
8:54
[SPEAKER_00]: We were actually rope jumping.
8:57
[SPEAKER_00]: We weren't highlighting, and we messed up some of the engineering on the project, and thankfully we had our backup, otherwise we wouldn't have one of our people today.
9:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow.
9:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
9:12
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, as long as an engineer went to engineering school, I don't know if you are.
9:18
[SPEAKER_03]: I would say your employee is an engineer right now, right?
9:21
[SPEAKER_00]: I actually haven't worked as an engineer and I just hit a year actually in February 21st.
9:27
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow.
9:28
[SPEAKER_03]: That's great.
9:29
[SPEAKER_03]: I guess.
9:30
[SPEAKER_03]: Is that what you want?
9:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, it was a choice.
9:33
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't like I got fired or anything.
9:35
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, that's awesome.
9:36
[SPEAKER_03]: That's awesome.
9:37
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, it helps with the stuff that you do.
9:39
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, you just mentioned rope jumping.
9:41
[SPEAKER_03]: And if people want to know more about walking on air, then again, go back to episode 11 84.
9:48
[SPEAKER_03]: But let's talk about rope jumping.
9:51
[SPEAKER_03]: What on earth is that?
9:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Man, yes, a rope jumping is a rope jumping comes from a long time ago, so back in the day and in your semity, there was a guy named Dan Osmond, almost everybody, even people that don't climb no about this guy.
10:07
[SPEAKER_00]: He was the crazy climber who, you know, he did a bunch of climbing without ropes, and I think that became not extreme enough for him, so what he started doing was he started taking climbing ropes and anchoring them to the tops of cliffs, and you know he would feed himself like so much slack, like, you know, sometimes up to like hundreds of meters of slack.
10:30
[SPEAKER_00]: and then jump off the cliff tied to the other end of the rope.
10:34
[SPEAKER_00]: So he'd free fall up to like, you know, 200 meters before that rope caught him.
10:38
[SPEAKER_00]: It was basically like a think of it almost like a DIY bungee jump really with flaming ropes.
10:45
[SPEAKER_03]: holy cow, so people are familiar with a bungee jumping, you know, it's at the state fair and it's at the nearest canyon with a bridge, right, has a bungee jump these days, but rope jumping, okay, first of all everyone needs to know this, we're talking about dynamic ropes, they do have a little bit of stretch, that's what makes it possible, otherwise the rope might snap and you would certainly die at the end of it, but with a dynamic rope,
11:13
[SPEAKER_03]: you can do a jump, a big jump, and be okay.
11:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Yep.
11:18
[SPEAKER_00]: For the most part, you still have to be well supported.
11:22
[SPEAKER_00]: If it's a big enough jump, you don't want to be just tied into a harness.
11:25
[SPEAKER_00]: You also want to chest harness.
11:28
[SPEAKER_00]: The force that your body experiences at the bottom is pretty even throughout.
11:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Otherwise, you've got to have a really strong cord and not like.
11:36
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, kind of like hurt your back a little bit a little bit a little bit.
11:41
[SPEAKER_00]: I've I've never restrained my back personally But I know like people with like less core strength or heavier guys.
11:46
[SPEAKER_00]: They've they've had little strains And I mean I'm excited to dive into this but before we dive into it.
11:52
[SPEAKER_00]: I do want to say that You know rope jumping can be safe If you're doing like more of an arc and actual swing rather than like a free fall kind of thing
12:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
12:04
[SPEAKER_00]: But in your semity, um, it's actually your semity particularly because mo app, you know, there's a lot of swings in Utah and like the canyon lands and like arches and stuff, right?
12:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are swings.
12:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are like, we kind of call those robes swings because there's a lot more of a swing than a free fall, right?
12:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
12:23
[SPEAKER_00]: But when we're doing it in your semity, we call it rob jumping because it's a lot more of a free fall than a swing.
12:30
[SPEAKER_00]: And what I'd like to say about this because, you know, like, I was telling you before we started that we had a, we had that tragic accident in Arches National Park where they didn't measure their rope length correctly.
12:43
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to say that rope jumping, like, you know, when you're doing it more free fall than swing.
12:50
[SPEAKER_00]: is definitely technically not a safe thing to be.
12:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Whenever we go rope jumping, we are definitely pushing the gear past its working load limit.
13:00
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we're not quite pushing it to like the breaking strength, but there's many cases where, you know, if you got like a 200 pound plus guy jumping, where he's going to reach over 50% of the main webings,
13:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Breaking strength so you know you never you never really want to be hitting that on a normal scale So whenever whenever we're out doing these things we like you know, we're very aware It's like it isn't extreme thing where you're not just pushing the sport anymore But you're also pushing the limits of the gear a little bit so
13:33
[SPEAKER_00]: where we're retiring this gear a lot more often than we would for just like normal wear and tear and highlighting or climbing where you know double triple checking making sure we have everything rig correctly and that like nobody's gonna like strike a cliff and it definitely just even fuels like when you when you watch your body go over the cliff and you just see them like tummoing toward the earth that you know full gravity acceleration it's a scary feeling you know
14:03
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that's an understatement alone, so as Gary feeling, it terrifies me just to think about it.
14:09
[SPEAKER_03]: So there's something that people who are not climbers need to know about ropes, and that is that they're dynamic, but if you take a hard fall on a rope then it loses some of the ability to stretch.
14:20
[SPEAKER_03]: And they don't stretch that much anyway, maybe 10% I mean, I mean, it's a lot.
14:24
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's closer to 25 or 30 under like working load limit.
14:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
14:29
[SPEAKER_00]: So it can be a bit BS, you're right, they stay kind of stretched.
14:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And they don't, they don't always fully like reset that quickly.
14:38
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so I mean, if you were to try this on to an old rope that doesn't stretch right anymore, I would think that would be not only now with the three more force that you're going to encounter at the bottom, but you're also working with something that a lot of its strength comes from its ability to stretch.
14:56
[SPEAKER_03]: So it loads the rope a lot more if it can't stretch as much.
15:00
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, there are just so many considerations.
15:02
[SPEAKER_00]: true.
15:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And here I'm going to give you one more thing actually that I forgot to mention here.
15:07
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're not just jumping onto a rope, right?
15:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Because think of this.
15:12
[SPEAKER_00]: If you have a rope attached to the cliff that you're jumping off of, right?
15:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And you jump off that same cliff, what's going to keep you from striking that cliff at the bottom of the jump, right?
15:25
[SPEAKER_00]: So,
15:25
[SPEAKER_00]: What we actually do, at least in Yosemite, we rig a high line out in the gap first, and the rope is actually connected to the middle of that high line.
15:36
[SPEAKER_00]: So you don't just have the rope stretching anymore, but you also have the slack line stretching, and it becomes a whole system, which does make it safer, because you get a lot more stretch, because you get like double the stretch basically of what you would with just a rope.
15:53
[SPEAKER_00]: It adds a lot more complications because you're not now just like worrying about the ropes.
15:57
[SPEAKER_00]: You're also worrying about the high line and the clearance and you've got to make sure the point of where the ropes are attached on the high line is like perfectly centered.
16:07
[SPEAKER_00]: So you kind of swing out into the gap and you don't strike that rock like out to your right or whatever, you know?
16:14
[SPEAKER_03]: I think one of the hardest things for rock climbers when they first get into the sport or repelling even is learning to trust the gear, learning to trust the ropes really going to catch you.
16:25
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know, I'm just going to be really transparent alone, so I don't know if I could ever trust a rope enough and a high line enough to jump.
16:33
[SPEAKER_03]: I know it can, the numbers work out, people do it, but personally, I don't know if I would overcome that.
16:40
[SPEAKER_00]: If it makes you feel better, we, you know, our, our pioneer Dan Osmond that I was talking about earlier, he, he died doing this sport.
16:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reason he died, he, you know, there's, there's a lot of rumors, but what I, to my interpretation, the thing that happened was, you know, he left his, his rope up there over, like, you know, a cold, like snow, time or something like that, maybe it was just cold in general.
17:07
[SPEAKER_00]: But he let it like go through some weather cycles for like a couple.
17:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if it was a couple weeks days or months, but like he left it to his stuff up there and he went up to retrieve his stuff.
17:19
[SPEAKER_00]: He was just going to go up there to like take it down and you know, once he got up there, he was like, I will, you know what, it's already set up.
17:24
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just going to give it one more jump before I take it down.
17:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And the rope snapped, that was his last jump.
17:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And the speculation is that it was up there in the sun breaking down in the UV and all these weather and the elements on his gear that just like worn it down enough to where, like said, wasn't really rated for that kind of fall anymore.
17:49
[SPEAKER_00]: So, we learn from that right, you know, the tragic accidents are like, one of the best ways to learn as a community and, you know, we're not using single ropes when we jump anymore.
18:00
[SPEAKER_00]: We, it's this is, we do the same thing that we do with highlining now.
18:03
[SPEAKER_00]: We're like, you know, one of the ropes is like the tight one that's like supposed to catch us.
18:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we rig another one with like an extra like five meters of slack in it, just as a backup in case the main one breaks for whatever reason.
18:16
[SPEAKER_03]: So the backup, you have a backup on your high line as well, and so I mean, there's a redundancy everywhere there.
18:25
[SPEAKER_03]: You could begin to think of this as safe, mathematically, anyway.
18:30
[SPEAKER_00]: yep yep and then also you know we're we're beefing up the high-line systems like we're using we're using a stronger webbing than we normally would like for a regular high-line setup because there's like performance webings that are like you know still very strong but like not as strong as like a very be like nylon or polyester webbing you know because there's there's definitely like different thicknesses of webbing that are like stronger but like you know when they're thicker and stronger they're harder to walk so like
19:00
[SPEAKER_00]: you kind of have to like pick what you want and obviously like when we're ropes jumping we we don't really walk the line anyway so we're gonna pick like a nice beefy strong material.
19:12
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay so along so describe it to us take us there we've been dancing around this idea people are probably getting a picture but what's it really like to do this?
19:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Man, it is a, so I do a lot of things, you know, I, I've, um, I rock, I'm obviously a lot, I high line a lot.
19:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I, I even did a bunch of skydiving in my day, like I've, I've got 50 jumps under my belt in my lifetime.
19:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And I can confidently say that as far as like a fear, you know, like as far as like a fear factor goes, nothing even comes close to rope jumping.
19:53
[SPEAKER_00]: like nothing I've ever done comes even close to rope jumping like jumping out of a plane not nearly as scary if if you've ever jumped out of a plane uh i would say jumping out of a plane is like like a three if jumping off a cliff attached to a rope is a 10 it's wow
20:13
[SPEAKER_00]: It's terrifying because you're like, you step up, you're tied into these ropes, right?
20:18
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's go there, you're tied into some ropes, and you've got to, you've got to like, mustard, the will, or like, stand on the edge of the cliff, and like keep in mind, these ropes are heavy.
20:29
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not like, they're not, they don't win nothing.
20:32
[SPEAKER_00]: So you've got like 30, maybe 40 pounds of weight pulling you into the void that you have to like, hold onto, you know what I'm saying?
20:40
[SPEAKER_00]: You've got to imagine someone like,
20:41
[SPEAKER_00]: pushing you with like 30 pounds off the cliff right and you're just kind of have to stand there anyway and like fight it You know So you're standing there with like 30 pounds like wanting to pull you into this board and you're like looking down and you know The ropes are rigged level with us usually if not a little bit higher So you you see this giant arc go down into the void
21:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And then across and up to where you rigged it on the other side, and it looks long, you know, you're like, that is a lot of rope, and then, you know, your heart starts beating, and then, you know, everyone there, it's usually like a lot of people there, like, you know, ten plus people, and for most first timers, it's really hard for them to want to commit to jumping.
21:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So they need a countdown.
21:32
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like it's just become like a tradition where like everyone counts down and so you know you say you're ready And then like whoever's the the lead organizer starts a countdown they go okay 10 and then you know like you've got like 20 people all chanting like a countdown And oh man the second you leave the cliff and you you feel the acceleration and like your heart's up in your throat, you know
21:58
[SPEAKER_00]: It's scary.
21:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The very first time I did it, I scream the whole way down and instantly lost my voice.
22:04
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the most absurd thing, like I couldn't speak after I came up as terrifying.
22:11
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I believe you, I mean, when I say it that way, I mean, you say it's scary.
22:15
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm like, yeah, no, that would terrify me.
22:19
[SPEAKER_03]: That is nuts.
22:21
[SPEAKER_03]: So once you swing out, you're on the rope now and on the, the high line, how do you get down?
22:29
[SPEAKER_00]: So in your somebody, we don't go down.
22:31
[SPEAKER_00]: We come back up because, you know, down is still like another 200 meters in most cases.
22:37
[SPEAKER_00]: and up is only usually around 70 meters.
22:42
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a couple ways to do it actually, so if you were going, if you wanted to do it the most bare bones way, you just descend the rope.
22:51
[SPEAKER_00]: You take some climbing gear down with you, like the same like ascenders and some nylon ladders and stuff.
22:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And you spend the next 30 to 40 minutes ascending that rope.
23:02
[SPEAKER_00]: up to anchor point and then you just clip into the high line and you kind of like drag yourself off the high line That is this is really hard to do because you know like you you not only have to ascend a 70 meter rope You then have to you know Come out of this high line that's like angled pretty steep usually with like 50 pounds of weight on you because of the ropes and like all You know
23:25
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's it's pretty hard to do it that way and also very inefficient so if you've got again this is only if you have a small group if you've got a big group this is where the engineering gets really really fun because then we use a third rope a bunch of pulley redirects and we actually lowered down a rope
23:44
[SPEAKER_00]: to the person that just jumped.
23:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's got like a knot and a ring on it and they just clip into it.
23:51
[SPEAKER_00]: They clip into that, they let us know through a radio and they're clipped in and safe.
23:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And we literally pull them right back up to the cliff with like 20 people and a couple of progress capture devices and it takes like three minutes.
24:04
[SPEAKER_03]: Kind of a block and tackle setup of some sort.
24:07
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not even a block in tackle, it's just one rope redirected through a bunch of pulleys just to make it a clear straight line to them, so it doesn't braid on anything.
24:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And you don't really need block in tackle, because if you've got 20 people all pulling, you can very easily, so usually we have a runway behind the cliff of 100 feet.
24:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone just grabs onto the rope and just walks backwards, 100 feet, and then you reset
24:34
[SPEAKER_00]: They it's so fun to come up because you you can feel some acceleration even coming up because your friends are pulling you so fast and then they all turn loose.
24:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Psych Yeah, then you just get a second rope jump for three years.
24:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
24:47
[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
24:48
[SPEAKER_03]: Holy cow.
24:49
[SPEAKER_03]: It just sounds so crazy to me alone.
24:52
[SPEAKER_03]: So I guess I gotta ask the question because I know their listeners out there.
24:56
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like a
24:57
[SPEAKER_03]: Why risk it?
24:59
[SPEAKER_03]: Why do it?
25:00
[SPEAKER_03]: What's the point?
25:02
[SPEAKER_00]: It's you know, it's the seeking the thrill really like you know thrill seekers is a very literal thing like Yeah, there's there's no there's honestly no other reason you know you want to You want to be a nature and all that stuff, but you also want to be like seeking some thrills and adrenaline sometimes
25:21
[SPEAKER_00]: I tell people that, you know, highlighting isn't an adrenaline sport, but, you know, rope jumping definitely is.
25:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Definitely.
25:29
[SPEAKER_00]: I can, I couldn't say, I've ever once just felt like peaceful rope jumping.
25:34
[SPEAKER_00]: I've always definitely felt like amped up, and like my heart was going to beat out of my chest, you know?
25:39
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow.
25:41
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, how many jumps have you done?
25:43
[SPEAKER_00]: think I've done about five now five five or six maybe you know they're there are a lot of effort you know they're like yeah logistically it's the most complicated thing to plan because you have to rig a whole high-line system and then you have to like put a rope on it everyone that you invite has to be fully committed to pulling everybody else back up so you know they can't go get distracted and like do other beautiful things in the park
26:07
[SPEAKER_00]: and you know it's like it's a big ask right it's like you're asking 20 people 10 to 20 people like hey I need you to be here for the next two days you're going to get about like 10 seconds of action but you're going to work pulling people up for two days straight you know it's it's definitely a big ask you know it gets one person jumping but definitely a team sport yes big team sport
26:35
[SPEAKER_03]: that's kind of cool though and this came up with a highlining as well the number of people it takes to string a rig this big it's oh yeah for for a big one it's definitely a community sport
26:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and I like that in the sense that, man, why do you do this if it's not to be with your friends?
26:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
26:54
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that's, that's really the best part about it because can you imagine like spending a week out in the wilderness with just like people you didn't like?
27:04
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, no technology, like you're forced to like talk to them for entertainment.
27:09
[SPEAKER_00]: That that'd be kind of awful, right?
27:11
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
27:12
[SPEAKER_03]: So choose, choose your people wisely.
27:15
[SPEAKER_03]: That's what you're
27:16
[SPEAKER_00]: They have actually commercialized rope swinging a little bit if anyone if I'm serious if anyone wants to try it Check out rope swing moab.
27:27
[SPEAKER_00]: I got to give those guys a shout out because um They've done the most streamlined rope swings I've ever seen and you can just show up You know you buy you buy a jump and you can experience a rope swing in moab
27:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it's like 200 bucks or something like that, which is, you know, very reasonable to pay for something you can literally not do anywhere else in the world.
27:51
[SPEAKER_00]: like at a commercial grade if that makes sense, so don't check out Robeswing Moab and if you want to see what a Robeswing feels like.
28:02
[SPEAKER_03]: That's crazy.
28:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Nuts.
28:04
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, you also do Trenets and you have a company even called Trenet Weaves.
28:11
[SPEAKER_03]: But I bet you they're most people are saying well a train it.
28:16
[SPEAKER_03]: What are we talking about now?
28:17
[SPEAKER_03]: What's a train it?
28:18
[SPEAKER_03]: I've seen tints that set up on three trees.
28:21
[SPEAKER_03]: I've seen webbing that people make nets out of to make a platform up high in a canopy or even in a house that they can play around on.
28:28
[SPEAKER_03]: What is your version of this?
28:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So the second thing you said is pretty accurate actually.
28:33
[SPEAKER_00]: So imagine like a tree house, right?
28:37
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's no lumber being used at all.
28:40
[SPEAKER_00]: webbing and paracord.
28:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And we make platforms out of it, walls, tunnels, so you can get into other platforms higher up into the tree.
28:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And it just becomes this giant web of, of, of treenet, you know, where it's like a bunch of, you can have a bunch of different platforms that you can hang out on.
28:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of them, like, if they're big enough, they're bouncy, like trampoline, so you could jump up and down and do flips and stuff.
29:05
[SPEAKER_00]: uh... essentially we're creating a giant spider web in the tree that you can play on and there's so much fun you know they're a lot of work but they are so much fun okay when you say a lot of work you know we're talking about son up some of these high lines for days how long does it take to set up these three nets
29:28
[SPEAKER_00]: definitely longer so like some some of my biggest projects have taken you know two months of collective effort you know where where you know some of them can be done in like a couple of days if i'm working by myself like a small one but a bigger project like for for a big family like on a ranch or something
29:50
[SPEAKER_00]: I can take up to a month doing it.
29:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what somebody else helping me.
29:54
[SPEAKER_00]: So like two people, about a month of work.
29:57
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, you know, the longest one I've ever done is two months of a single human's collective effort.
30:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow.
30:05
[SPEAKER_03]: So are you using webbing?
30:08
[SPEAKER_03]: What is the material?
30:10
[SPEAKER_00]: It depends.
30:10
[SPEAKER_00]: So the basic treatment is, first you have to outline it, right?
30:15
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to,
30:16
[SPEAKER_00]: you have to put the perimeter on it as I call it and that's that's static rope and again you know we we like redundancy so we use two strands of static rope around the trees so you you take a bundle of tree trunks that you want to rig a net a platform on right and you literally just wrap them with a static rope and then you know you have to protect the trees and like you have to use
30:42
[SPEAKER_00]: But once you got that, you tension it really tight with some polis and then you tie it together.
30:47
[SPEAKER_00]: So now you have a tensioned perimeter and that, you know, then you just fill it in with paracord.
30:54
[SPEAKER_00]: So we take a bunch of paracord and we just start stringing it up, you know, until the holes are small enough so that nobody split is going to fall through them.
31:04
[SPEAKER_03]: How much paracord are we talking about here?
31:06
[SPEAKER_03]: This is huge.
31:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Some?
31:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, like I said, you know, for that, for that really, really big one we did.
31:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to say we use like somewhere between 30 to 40,000 feet of paracord.
31:17
[SPEAKER_00]: uh... miles and miles and miles and miles of a record so it depends you know like a very small project you you might use about four thousand feet but a real big project you can i've i've heard of some companies using over a hundred thousand feet of paracord for their projects hundred thousand we're talking about twenty miles lot of paracord lot of paracord yeah
31:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Dang, that's wild.
31:45
[SPEAKER_03]: So what does it look like with some of these bigger projects?
31:49
[SPEAKER_00]: So it all depends on square footage, right?
31:52
[SPEAKER_00]: It per square foot.
31:55
[SPEAKER_00]: It takes about 30 to 40 feet of paracord to fill that one square foot in with small enough holes so that nobody's feet foot is gonna fall through.
32:05
[SPEAKER_00]: So you know, take 30.
32:08
[SPEAKER_00]: 30 feet of paracord equals one square foot of space right now figure out the square footage of whatever you're trying to do and skies the limit you know you can really you can go as big as you want you can go as small as you want obviously bigger's cooler better like if you can actually move around and like run on your platforms and jump and do flips and stuff you're going to have a lot more fun than like if you're constrained to like a tiny little nut where you
32:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, yeah, it just kind of depends like some some people want just a big platform that they could jump around on other people want to go like really high up into their trees So we do a bunch of smaller platforms to get there and other people want like a combination of both, you know It's a it's a cool thing because you know, it's skies the limit with your creativity and if you're a good rigor, you got some, you know, you got some engineering background, which you know, which I do
33:06
[SPEAKER_00]: you can do so many things with this craft.
33:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Interesting.
33:11
[SPEAKER_03]: How long do they last?
33:12
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, it takes a long time to get it up there, how long is it going to be viable?
33:16
[SPEAKER_00]: So, this is another one of those kind of little tricky gray areas, right?
33:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Because you should follow the manufacturer recommendation for things, right?
33:26
[SPEAKER_00]: And a manufacturer is always going to tell you, you know, even if your rope has been sitting in a closet, you should retire it after 10 years, right?
33:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously, you know, a lot of people have kind of disproven that and like they show that it still has a very high strength rating, but you know, for liability reasons and stuff, manufacturers say that, right?
33:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, sure.
33:48
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm the same.
33:49
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm the same way.
33:49
[SPEAKER_00]: So like with my own company, I tell people that they're going to get about five to seven years.
33:54
[SPEAKER_00]: but that's also kind of a bogus figure if you know what I mean like they can really get much, much, much longer than that if you know, they don't care to follow the manufacturer recommendations.
34:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And it depends on UV exposure.
34:10
[SPEAKER_00]: So if they're rigged somewhere wide open where there's no canopy of leaves above them or anything, and they're constantly getting beat on by the UV, then that five to seven years is probably accurate.
34:23
[SPEAKER_00]: If they're well shaded, and the conditions which they're set up in is ideal, and they're only seeing sunlight maybe like a couple hours a day, then these things can easily get 10 plus years
34:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Hmm.
34:39
[SPEAKER_03]: Amazing.
34:40
[SPEAKER_03]: At first I was thinking something along the idea of we're going to have a party and we're going to set this up for the party so everyone can enjoy this and you know, but what you're talking about is more like, no, no, this is a tree house you can raise your family with.
34:54
[SPEAKER_00]: oh yeah no absolutely this isn't like a this isn't like a set up for a weekend and you're done kind of thing this is like you know it's like it's a it's a tree house essentially like you're you want it to stay there as long as possible and you know you want your kids to grow up in it like you know if we set this up
35:12
[SPEAKER_00]: when your kids are like five years old, right?
35:15
[SPEAKER_00]: That train is ideally going to be there until those kids go off to college like 10 to 12 years later, right?
35:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Or like, at the very least, they're like teenagers and they don't even care to play entry houses anymore.
35:27
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a lot of fun.
35:35
[SPEAKER_03]: What gave you the idea to do this?
35:38
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's a gateway drug from, from highlining actually, uh, what initially gave me the idea was a long time ago.
35:45
[SPEAKER_00]: So, when I was first getting into slacklining really seriously, we have something called a space line.
35:53
[SPEAKER_00]: and so picture this with me right like a slack line is normally just a piece of webbing string between two trees right goes in a straight line now imagine three slack lines coming from three different trees and like a triangle shape all meeting up at a point in the middle okay.
36:12
[SPEAKER_00]: and like you know you and two of your friends can each walk one of the three slacklines and you know you guys affect each other's up and down motions but because you have a point in the middle kind of canceling all the left and right motions it's still very easy to walk with two other people walking at the same time as you and then you know when one of them falls you kind of get like launched up in the air a little bit right
36:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, but what we, what we started figuring out was, well, what if we, we, a net like a triangular net that all, all three of these slacklines can meet up in the middle and then we'll just walk out onto this like really cool hang out zone in the middle or where we can chill and like basically, you know,
36:55
[SPEAKER_00]: have a hammock strung between three slacklines and that was just like the very initial idea for me.
37:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I built one net for that purpose and realized, wow, this is really cool, it's like filling in this space with paracord and
37:10
[SPEAKER_00]: you know becoming a little spider and stuff and that was like the initial seed and what really pushed it over the top for me was when when COVID happened and we didn't have anything better to do we would go to the park and we started weaving a giant net like I'm talking like a 50 foot by 50 foot by 50 foot triangle that we would weave between like four of us for a couple hours a day
37:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Just because, you know, we were bored and everything was shut down.
37:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, just really enjoyed that.
37:39
[SPEAKER_00]: I enjoyed the process and then, you know, Lo and behold, I someone reached out to me because they saw me doing it on social media and they're like, Hey, can you build one of these for me?
37:48
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll pay for it.
37:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was like, oh, wow.
37:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I guess this could be a business kind of thing.
37:55
[SPEAKER_03]: This is kind of cool.
37:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
37:59
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, when you're weaving this, I think anyone that's messed with ropes much, they get this vision of You got to pull a lot of line through a knot or a lot of line through a weave or something and you get tangled up You're trying to untangle your, I mean, how do you manage it so that it's not just overwhelming?
38:18
[SPEAKER_00]: So, yeah, so when I talked like, you know, when I was talking like 20,000, 30,000, even 100,000 feet of paracord, it's not like you're just taking like 100,000 foot piece of paracord.
38:32
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, obviously, you're not just taking like 100,000 foot piece of paracord and like weaving that, right?
38:38
[SPEAKER_00]: You're usually doing it in like 20 to 30 foot segments where you cut a 30 foot piece of paracord off.
38:45
[SPEAKER_00]: You tie it, you tie an end.
38:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you weave it around until you run out of those 30 feet and then you tie the end and then you start over with another piece.
38:55
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's it's actually not that bad as far as getting tangled because you're only pulling like 20 feet of cord through a little hole in any given moment.
39:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And really that's only like three arm lengths if you really think about it.
39:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Hmm.
39:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
39:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
39:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, that's fine.
39:11
[SPEAKER_03]: next thing you're going to do is you're going to do a high line with this weave on it and you're going to be 600 feet in the air and a half a mile out.
39:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh no, that's that's that's that's already a thing actually like um people people have gotten married on these and that's like out in Moab like they'll they'll make a big one right string it up between a bunch of highlands and yeah it's it's called a it's called a
39:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so that's, you know, you see that on, you know, you see that in your like Google images one day and it's like It's even more inspiration to get into this craft because it's such a cool thing How many people can be on these at one time?
39:53
[SPEAKER_00]: As as strong as the anchors are so, you know, if you're if you're rigging these out in space and you've got Really really beefy anchors and webbing You know, I've seen up to 20 people on these at one time Just have to make sure you know what the rating for the anchor is
40:10
[SPEAKER_00]: yeah exactly and you know if you're if you're using bolts it's a little bit easier to kind of figure out because we we know the like average strength of a bolt but when you're using trees that's when it's kind of like a little more ambiguous because you know a tree can look super healthy and super strong but like you never really know what's going what's going on down in the roots right like you never really know if it's got some like some like loose
40:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Treat trees are living things, so they're much harder to gauge than a non-living thing like a bolt and a rock, right?
40:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I was I was building the house and we dug a trench for the phone and the electric lines to go through and I cut a little two inch root of a tree just one root of a of a tree and when we came back the next day the tree was on the ground
41:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
41:06
[SPEAKER_00]: It's crazy.
41:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Like one little thing to a tree and the wrong little thing and that like be it for that tree, you know, because I bet that tree had like a bunch of other roots that you probably thought was no big deal to cut that root.
41:18
[SPEAKER_00]: You're like, oh, yeah, this tree will be fine.
41:19
[SPEAKER_00]: It'll use all its other roots and it'll it'll live.
41:22
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, but that one route was under tension.
41:25
[SPEAKER_03]: We didn't know it, but it was under tension holding up the whole tree.
41:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's crazy.
41:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes, exactly.
41:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's a great way to visualize it.
41:34
[SPEAKER_00]: You just don't know what's keeping that tree there.
41:38
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't know how deep those routes go.
41:40
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't know where they're pulling or when the soil's, there's so many things.
41:46
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not an arborist by any means or I don't know my soil that well.
41:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, so it's uh, that's a little bit harder for me to gauge personally.
41:56
[SPEAKER_00]: So I use, I just, I have a rule of thumb or like if the tree's not at least two feet in diameter and looks healthy, you know, I'm just not going to use that tree.
42:07
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
42:07
[SPEAKER_03]: You got to do a lot of overkill for all the eventualities.
42:11
[SPEAKER_03]: Where can people see these things if they want to see what you're talking about?
42:14
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a website actually, so I'm www.trainetweaves.com.
42:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Trenet is one word weaves is another, and I put all my work up there, you know, I've got blogs on there that teach people how to do this thing, and I've also got a YouTube channel on that subject, I think we're just around 16,000 subscribers now, we're actually teach people how to make their own Trenets.
42:41
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a lot of fun.
42:42
[SPEAKER_03]: you know we have a little bit of time left i would like to hear about some big wall climbing that's something we didn't cover in the last interview at all and it's it's it's kind of its own animal i mean i i talked to a lot of people say i love rock climbing and then you find out well they're top roping which is super cool but it's not the same you know yeah you're right um when when's the last time we talked was it what what what what month was that
43:09
[SPEAKER_03]: It was still cold.
43:10
[SPEAKER_03]: So it was, it was more than you hear.
43:12
[SPEAKER_03]: It's cold still, but you're, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say it was two months ago.
43:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Two months ago.
43:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so yeah, actually, I think it's a good time for this, because I, I just climbed the nose of El Capita and actually, uh, about a month ago, um, so, funny story, I was supposed to go skiing.
43:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, and the weather turned out to be absolutely, absolutely, karate for skiing.
43:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It was like no snow this year.
43:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It was terrible snow year.
43:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
43:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And, um, I, you know, I called one of my main climbing partners.
43:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, and, you know, she's, she's got a very flexible schedule.
43:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was like, hey, um, this is super last minute.
43:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And this was like a Wednesday, by the way.
43:57
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't like a Wednesday.
43:58
[SPEAKER_00]: I was like, this is super last minute, but would you want to go climb the nose of El Capitán like tomorrow?
44:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually just said, yes, some down.
44:08
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll be I'll be right over and she like packed your stuff and came.
44:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, it's kind of funny.
44:14
[SPEAKER_00]: We showed up in and you're somebody valley and it's you know, it's it's February like very early February.
44:20
[SPEAKER_00]: It was actually like the last days of January.
44:22
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's cold.
44:23
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very cold.
44:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was nobody there.
44:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, normally when you pull up to a rock like El Capitan, there's like sometimes hundreds of cars lined up and like half of those cars are like from climbers who are like on the wall or like climbing somewhere else.
44:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Point is, there's usually a lot of traffic on this wall.
44:44
[SPEAKER_00]: We didn't see a single car anywhere in sight.
44:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And we, you know, we get out of the car and it's freezing.
44:51
[SPEAKER_00]: We got these like giant puffies on.
44:54
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we immediately started kind of doubting whether we had made a good decision or not because they're like This is a lot colder than I thought it was going to be up here.
45:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, like yeah, the snow was cruddy But that doesn't mean that like we can just go climbing and So nobody on the wall and we're immediately intimidated because we're like, ah, I think we're doing something down here But you know, let's go let's walk over there and then you know, we'll see
45:17
[SPEAKER_00]: It's cold here, but let's go touch the rock.
45:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And typically a rock is really good at absorbing heat and staying cold.
45:27
[SPEAKER_00]: It's sometimes it's really hard for a rock to warm up.
45:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So you can just touch a rock.
45:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And you'll instantly know, if it's zaps all the heat out of your hand, you know that I probably shouldn't be climbing this thing because my fingers are just going to be frozen the whole time.
45:40
[SPEAKER_00]: We walk up, it's like eight in the morning.
45:42
[SPEAKER_00]: We put our hand on the rock, and lo and behold,
45:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It is warm.
45:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Despite the really cold weather around us, the rock is doing a really good job at like, you know, absorbing the radiation from the sun and staying warm.
45:56
[SPEAKER_00]: And we immediately were like, oh no, this is a, this is a good decision.
46:01
[SPEAKER_00]: This is going to be a lot of fun.
46:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And we spent three and a half days on the wall in winter, all by ourselves, is quite a once-in-a-lifetime experience, I think, to have the whole, the most popular route in the world, you know, all to ourselves.
46:18
[SPEAKER_03]: Goodness.
46:19
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you did the whole Bivvy thing up on the wall for how many nights?
46:32
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow, it did it stay warm, that whole time.
46:35
[SPEAKER_00]: It was definitely, the wall was definitely warm.
46:38
[SPEAKER_00]: We had a great time while we were climbing.
46:40
[SPEAKER_00]: The only times we were a little bit cold were early in the morning, because we started climbing at like five in the morning every day.
46:47
[SPEAKER_00]: So those first couple hours when it was still dark, it was a little cold, but nothing crazy, honestly.
46:53
[SPEAKER_00]: I was pleasantly surprised.
46:56
[SPEAKER_03]: Explain the process of getting up a wall this size, what pitches are and how you belate each other and how you stay safe.
47:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, there's so much to dive into, but the general most basic concept is, so you start on the ground, right?
47:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And you got, you know, the walls 3000 feet tall, right?
47:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And your rope is like 200 feet long, so obviously you can't just like,
47:22
[SPEAKER_00]: you can't just like climb from the ground to the top and then like pull your partner out that's not how it works so we we do it in something called pitches and every route has a different number of pitches depending on how tall it is and how much it wanders and things like that so
47:38
[SPEAKER_00]: A pitch will typically be somewhere between 100 to 200 feet and you climb up to the length of this pitch.
47:45
[SPEAKER_00]: You anchor yourself in, there's usually bolts on the wall and if there's not bolts you use the cracks and you put in your own gear to make yourself safe and you make an anchor.
47:55
[SPEAKER_00]: So you've now climbed a pitch with the rope and you've made an anchor.
47:59
[SPEAKER_00]: and then you you can pull your partner up usually and all you do is you know you belay them from the top you take all the slack out of the rope and and you're um you're kind of pulling the slack out of the rope as they're climbing right but for big wall climbing it's actually completely different so everything's the same up until the point where you climb up and you make your anchor but instead of pulling your second person up
48:26
[SPEAKER_00]: and they actually ascend it with handheld decenders and nylon ladders and stuff.
48:33
[SPEAKER_00]: So once you've tied their ropes safely, you don't even have to worry about them.
48:37
[SPEAKER_00]: You actually have a much harder job to do now because if you think about it, we're spending three days on this wall, right?
48:45
[SPEAKER_00]: that means you need to bring up enough water, food, you need to have sleeping bags and like and you need to have your toiletries because you need to poop and so you know we're carrying poop up the wall and like all this stuff so we have this big green bag it's like it's about 120 liters big and nothing weighs like 50 pounds.
49:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And with a completely separate rope, a static rope usually, you put it into a rope, a rope capture device.
49:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And instead of pulling up your partner, you're pulling up this big green bag and you're literally dragging that thing up the wall.
49:23
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a hard thing to do, you know.
49:25
[SPEAKER_00]: You're pulling 50 pounds away up the wall.
49:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It's dragging up the wall so there's a bunch of friction and all this stuff and it's, you know, you're doing that.
49:34
[SPEAKER_00]: You're doing that so you get it all the way up there.
49:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And once the bag and your partner are all up there, you start over and do it again.
49:42
[SPEAKER_00]: It's actually a really slow process when you include a hall bag on the journey.
49:49
[SPEAKER_03]: How hard is it to set up your your bivouac without drop and stuff and getting it right and I mean I can imagine at the end of a hard climbing day your cold you're ready for food you're ready for your sleeping bag you've got a lot of work left to do.
50:04
[SPEAKER_00]: yeah so so there's actually there's two ways to do the the bivvy um so we we were fortunate that there was nobody on the route right um there's a couple natural bivouacs on the wall meaning that there's like a physical rock ledge that's big enough for you and your partner and all your stuff to fit on um normally what you have to do you have to bring up something called a portal edge it's it's like a
50:30
[SPEAKER_00]: It's basically a metal frame, you know, it's big enough, it's a metal rectangular frame, big enough for you and your partner to fit on and it's got like a nylon cloth that's tensioned between all those metal poles and, you know, you're literally like on a
50:46
[SPEAKER_00]: on a sky platform sleep in you know you hook this up to your anchor and you got to just all the different legs just right so that it's perfectly level and you're not like falling off the thing you know and then you know you got to make sure that like every single thing you've got up there is like clip
51:06
[SPEAKER_00]: into something so that if you happen to drop it, it doesn't actually fall into the abyss.
51:12
[SPEAKER_00]: It's it's really hard even with a lot of experience to keep everything in check.
51:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, we definitely dropped a couple of things on our assent up the nose, but
51:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the the whole bivouac thing is it's honestly arguably the most part like you're sleeping a thousand feet up in the air with one of your best friends and you know you're enjoying like a nice hot rom and meal at the end of the day together It was like No, there's no better feeling than watching the sunset look like a thousand feet below you and you just got a nice hot bowl of soup in your hand You know, I have to point out again.
51:46
[SPEAKER_03]: It is winter.
51:48
[SPEAKER_03]: It's in the winter time, too Burr dude just sounds cold
51:52
[SPEAKER_00]: it was it was cold you know we're we're pretty well adapted to the cold in that regard so I it honestly wasn't even as big of a deal as I thought it was going to be you know we each brought like multiple big puffy jackets and we like rarely use them I think we used them maybe for like an hour at in the very late evening each and that was about it wow
52:18
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, it sounds fascinating, and I don't know how many people have done that versus how many people have and accept that most people might see it from a distance and just go, wow, you know, that's out there.
52:32
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a dying art actually, believe it or not.
52:34
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm going to help familiar you are with the progression of climbing.
52:40
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll just throw this out there real quick before I I'm gonna try to like be quick about this But the movie Valley up rising if you haven't seen it check it out because that details like the entire history of climbing and your Semedy specifically, but like you know your Semedy is the birthplace of climbing So it's like a pretty good indicator as to how like how this sport has evolved and
53:01
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, back in the day like the gear, it wasn't that great and like the protection wasn't good and even like the climbing shoes they weren't that great so performance wise like people weren't really climbing that hard so the way they they got up walls is they relied on their gear, you know they hammered ptons into the cracks and like you know they pulled their gear up on roads and even for like you know even for like a more basic climb of today they spent many days going up these walls like
53:29
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, I don't know how long it took the first team to ascend the northwest face of half dome, but it was a lot of nights.
53:37
[SPEAKER_00]: You know what I mean?
53:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And now people are going up that thing in like 10 hours, so they don't even spend the night on the wall usually.
53:44
[SPEAKER_00]: So because that's where the sport is trending, like the sport is trending to like more performance, more speed,
53:52
[SPEAKER_00]: people don't really want to spend nights on the wall because you know I was explaining to you how you have to haul that big haul bag out of the water and stuff people people hate doing that and for a good reason it's hard so most people nowadays are just like completely skipping that part of the process
54:09
[SPEAKER_00]: and they're just getting stronger so that they can climb faster so that they can get up walls in a day and like not have to worry about bivving and like they can come back down and shower and like sleep in a real bed, you know.
54:24
[SPEAKER_00]: It's definitely a dying art.
54:25
[SPEAKER_00]: People are less excited about big wall climbing and spending multiple nights on a wall than they are about just moving really, really fast and efficient through that same wall and not spend a night on the wall.
54:38
[SPEAKER_03]: Right, still sounds good, though.
54:40
[SPEAKER_03]: I, something about just being up there, you know?
54:44
[SPEAKER_03]: I interviewed it a lady years ago.
54:47
[SPEAKER_03]: She called it adventure sleeping, and she just liked to find really unique places to spend the night.
54:53
[SPEAKER_03]: It was actually a really fun interview.
54:56
[SPEAKER_03]: She traveled the world, looking for places to sleep, that people just wouldn't expect.
55:01
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, and hanging a thousand feet off the ground is one of those places, even though people have done a lot of it, it's still fascinating.
55:09
[SPEAKER_00]: It's so fun.
55:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I love it.
55:12
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, well I want so that was that was fun to catch up with you to hear the rest of the story that we didn't get the first time and and you're doing a lot of really really fun stuff.
55:24
[SPEAKER_03]: How can people learn more?
55:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Man, I mean, the, I think the easiest thing is just follow me on Instagram, my user name is Alonso, underscore, Sky Rig was like, like Rodriguez, but with the word Sky.
55:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Sky instead of Rod.
55:42
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, exactly.
55:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, Alonzo, thank you again.
55:45
[SPEAKER_03]: I have to catch up again next time you do something big and outrageous.
55:49
[SPEAKER_03]: Gotta learn more about it, but anyway.
55:52
[SPEAKER_03]: Hey, everybody out there, I know that Alonzo, I mean, he's inspiring just the stuff he's putting together.
55:59
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's so cool.
56:00
[SPEAKER_03]: But find your own thing, and it may not be a kilometer walking 600 feet through the air on a one-inch wide piece of web and it may not be sleeping a thousand feet above the ground.
56:12
[SPEAKER_03]: but find your own adventure and make sure you do get out there and have some fun.
56:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Well said.