What a day it was for the 500m Project. I was scoping around for a new place to rig Uber Longlines when I stumbled upon a field which has gaps ranging from 615 ft. all the way up to 1,625 feet! The best part is, the ranger in charge of the area does not care if we use this land for our project. This was music to our ears because we now have a place where we can rig lines incrementally up to 500m and not have to worry about access issues.

With very limited time on Thursday, we decided last minute that we would rig a line in this park to test it out and see if it's a viable option for our project. We initially were going to only rig a 800 footer or so, but we ended up going really big with a 1,260 footer. We put the anchors WAY up on the tree on this line, which made it pretty much a highline at the anchors. We got the line up so quickly this time, it only took us around 45 minutes total. Unfortunately, we didn't leave enough room in the tensioning system to get it tight enough to walk, but we decided that we could train the transitions a lot better when it's SUPER loose to be ready for when the line is actually walkable. This proved to be a good idea.

This line was absolutely ridiculously loose. We had probably 15 feet of sag on this thing and it still touched the ground in the middle. I would guess that there was only around 3,500 lbf of tension on the line (which made it really safe to walk given how we rigged it). Man oh man, the transition stage of this line was beastly! I never made it from the anchor past the transition stage in one go. I would fall every 100 feet or so and do a line-catch. We had to walk with a rope around our shoulder so that we could throw it over the line to pull it down (that's how high the line was, hehe). Chris, however, was feeling pretty strong on this line. He was able to get through the transition stage one time while constantly talking shit about the line while walking (this method works well for him). It was very motivating to see him get this far on this beast.

Chris and I studied this line as much as we could on this day, in order to have an idea of what it will feel like when we have enough tension for it to be walkable. I think that with just a tad bit more tension on this line, it would make it a thousand times easier to walk.

More to come on the Road to 500m Project. Here are more pictures from the day:

Line-Specs