The Insanity Rope Swing in Moab Utah - Human testing!

All right, let's see if I can hang on to 2.5-ish kilonewtons with just my arms. Check out those guns. Check out the guns. You know, it's funny because I can't wakeboard because I can't hang on to the handles. Oh, I hate this. So, in theory, my should rip out of my hands before it rips out my shoulders, right? Yeah. Three. Focus. Two. Bend your elbows. One. Breathe. Go down. Go down. Go down. Yeah! Woo! Nailed it! I think he doesn't want to let go. Good one, buddy! Woo! Three. Two. ****. Hold up. Oh! You've changed, dude. Big time. Want me to kick you? No, I'm just going to hit my head on this thing. Homer, and I'm about to jump the swing. Perfect. And what do you got here? A Line Scale 2, sponsored by Line Scale. All right. Peak forces on, dude. We're going to do some science. Jumping off the GGB Y net. I'm going to do a little 3-2-1. I'm going to do a 3-2-1. Good job, Homer. Thanks, dude. What did you get? I turned it off, but it was 3.34. 3.34. Pretty good. How much are you weighing? I weigh 195. Okay. Cool. 200. Science. Let's get this thing reset. I weigh 134 pounds. I'm on peak force. All right. And I am going to run off of a cliff. All right. Yeah. Go, go, go, go. Jesus. I asked myself why I was doing it. How much force did you get? 3.16. What? Because you jumped forward. I jumped forward. Yeah. Yeah. So you got less swing. Wow. The swing really makes a difference. Yeah. Science rules. Hi, my name is Zach. I weigh about 155, and I'm about to jump on the net. For science. For science. 3-2-1. For science. For science. I love it. We fall, and the wind catches you, and then next thing you know, you're hanging on the ropes. It was amazing. Yeah. Thanks. What peak force did you get? 1.84. Wow. Pretty cool. Good job, man. How much do you weigh? 74 kilos. Is this your first rope swing? Yeah. My first ever. Yeah. Are we going to do some science? Yeah. Let's do it. Well, Mateus, you got half a kilonewton more than me. How was it? Very good, dude. Amazing. Beautiful. So we got two 80-meter ropes here. For those of you who don't know what 80 meters is, that's about 300 feet. I've never jumped 80 meters before, and I am going to do some science. No, I'm just going to hit my head on this thing. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. That's pretty good. Let's see if we can capture that. 2.68. Man. Wow. It's pretty down here. So before I get into the numbers and we get in the chart, please don't rope swing unless you know what you're doing. We will have a ropes course or a Highline University course on rope swinging shortly, but we don't yet. Plus, you should always go with somebody who knows what they're doing. However, the numbers are right here. And we basically had 195-pound maximum weight person and 134-pound lightweight person. And we were getting anywhere from 1.8 to 3.3 kilonewtons. We did have Marcus Nelson also jump, but we didn't capture any of that. And then he was 190 pounds and 2.8 kilonewtons. So it doesn't always exactly line up. There are a lot of variables, and it depends, we found, how you jump. If you run forward, you're going to get a higher force. And then if you run out you're going to get a little bit more swing in there, which is how I was able to hang on with my Super 8 that I had these handles that I put in there. Because when I did it back in Yosemite earlier last year, that I didn't have this and the rope crushed around my hands. So if you ever are crazy enough to try hanging on to rope swing, just know it's nice to have something that keeps the rope from basically breaking my pinky. But that rope jump where I am hanging on does demonstrate that the amount of force being applied so slowly within a swing doesn't always equal how much force another scenario would be on your body. We did our shock loads of myth in another video, and that had about four, four and a half kilonewtons on my body. And that hurt pretty bad because it was a sudden stop. So it's kind of a magic trick to hang on to a rope swing. I definitely don't recommend it. It can definitely hurt your arms, break your pinkies. It's more or less a stupid stunt. However, I was always curious if I could basically do what science says I can't because it's just counterintuitive to be able to hang on to basically 700 pounds of force. I'm not that strong. I'm also not that smart because I never thought about when I was done. The whole system is basically the rope is attached to my jump rope and it gets lowered to me and I clip in. A couple of things I didn't think about was if I wanted to not hang on anymore, because I was still attached to the second rope quite loosely, I would have dropped maybe 15 feet. If I let go, the problem is my whole rope would only go to the top of that rope. But if I let go, the rope would have got sucked up 15, 20 feet and putting a 30, 40 foot gap between me and where the whole rope would come down to. And so I had to hang on the whole time and I was getting pretty tired and then I had to one hand connect it. So I got to work on the exit plan of my stunts from now on. Now this video is kind of like all over the place. So now that we showed you the fun stuff and showed you the forces, we will now talk about the next interesting thing we did, that I was dumb enough to try, was I got on the damn net. I don't know how many people have ever really got on the thing it's attached to, but I thought it'd be a cool angle to film from. And when Kenan jumped off, I felt pretty good. I was clipped in two clipping points with my Super Bomber Petzl Daisy personal anchor here. However, I wasn't expecting to use it. I thought I would just either hang on, but the moment he left the cliff, my heart sank because I realized I was not prepared for it. I wish the camera was facing me because the look on my face had this oh ---- look and, and I was only holding onto my phone like this. Literally, I didn't even have my little space net thing that keeps it, you know, attached to me. And I just realized this clamped down and went for a ride. Check it out. I believe it's Kenan who's about to jump. Not mistaken. I can't really tell from here. And I am attached to the net. Holy ----. I better hang on tight. Hanging on tight, hanging on tight. So you can see at this other angle that somebody filmed that, uh, they were talking about Kenan, he caught his hat as he was falling, but you can see me right in the corner fly out of the net. It was nuts. Anyways, we got the forces on the leg of the space net when Kenan jumped while I was on it. And we got just me on there, 6.7 kilonewtons. And when Kenan jumped and I fell out, the peak force peaked out at 12.9 kilonewtons, which is a little high. And Kenan and me just chilling there was 8.67 kilonewtons. So, uh, with our added weight, it technically only went up about four kilonewtons. But when you're playing with almost 13 kilonewtons on a leg, you don't want to be doing tandem rope jumps. I do not ever allow tandem rope jumps on my systems. I don't advocate for that. I do believe that it's pretty risky because I'm okay with the safety ratios in this world. Uh, I don't really feel like it's necessary to push the limits of our safety ratios. Keep in mind that some slack lines break around 20 kilonewtons, not the spider silk I was using, but I mean, you're only talking between 30 and 40. And then, uh, ropes, the dynamic ropes we were using break around 15 kilonewtons. So like, you know, I'm happy with having only three or four kilonewtons on my ropes. Now, another interesting thing about me getting back on the net, not having learned my lesson when Alita jumped and you can see in this video how the rope does this S-shape whipping thing right as she's jumping in this slow-mo video. And I was able to capture this in slow motion with my GoPro since I was at basically the fulcrum of the entire system. And so it kind of has this whipping thing. And then the haul system rope comes and travels up the rope really, really fast. And so, uh, it's kind of nice to understand how that works since you're going to be rigging and you want to have your knots and your stoppers, everything. So the carabiner doesn't get stuck on the wrong side of a knot and does not lower itself down when you want it to. And no, I did not fall out of the net that time because I basically burrowed my legs through the net and my arms. So I was like one with the net. So I'm getting better at that. Now, to give you a comparison of the forces, pink tube is a very, very stretchy webbing. And when I got on Dean's line, it was, it's only 40 meters long and I was whipping in the middle and I got 1.72 and 1.6 kilonewtons on my leash where I connected it to me. And that doesn't count what the slackline saw, but basically the rope jump was getting doubled. And that's just something for reference. If I was using a low stretch webbing, the peak force I would see on my dyno attached to my harness would definitely be higher. Now, the second part of this video is going to show the haul system and the winch that my friends built in order to haul people back up. The haul system is the same system that I started to use a couple of years ago in order to haul people back up to the exit point, which is super useful instead of pulling them straight up, which is a little bit more convenient, but then they have to travel off to the side. Not so convenient. And this way, if something were to fail, that you're pulling them up. And if they, something breaks, they just swing again. They're not near the cliff. There's, um, a lot less that can go wrong and you don't have to reset the ropes because resetting the ropes requires a lot of moving around cliff edges when you may not be clipped in. Okay. This is our whole system from, uh, we started doing about two years ago. We have this beater is what you clip to the person down below. That is what gets pulled up with our paracord that goes to a pulley, goes over to Callen. So he's going to pull it over. We're going to release it. We disengage the teeth from our protraction and they're feeding rope out to us right now. And then we reset it. And that way the rope is out of the way. When we jump, we just move this rope over to here and then the jump ropes are free to do what they need to do. You don't want to be attached to the haul line when you are rope swinging. In case it got snagged on something, you'd have a sudden stop and it would suck. Wow. It just falls for days. All right, here we go. Oh my God. So that winch cap stand machine was made by Mike Stamola and Silvan Christensen. And Taylor Palmer actually has a really neat one that kind of has an open into it. So it's easier to put the rope on and off and maybe we can get him to show us how his machine works. But basically that really helps prevent a lot of the manual labor of pulling. The old system was to have 20 people and you would just rotate, but that adds complication. Now showing you our haul system kind of just gives you an overall on how it works. It is kind of complicated. I'm trying to use more of an arborist foot ascender setup so I can just jug myself back up on the bigger rope swings that we want to do in order to just eliminate the haul system altogether. I try not to make my future rope jumps are not so consumer-based where just everyone, anybody can do it. It's mostly that experts can do it and people that can self-rescue and things like that. However, if you're interested in rope jumping, because people have mentioned this before, we can provide you and a group of people to do a rope jump. You can't really do it in Yosemite, not commercially. So there is potential that we could get a permit in Moem and I've got a couple different teams that we can partner up with in order to give you and your group a chance to rope swing. You would have to put together a large group and split the cost because I mean, it'd be pretty expensive, but like a bachelor party or something like it could, it could be worth it. Just hit me up at skyliningatlive.com. And if you're interested, otherwise, hownottohighline.com is going to have a course in detail on how all this works. So keep your eye out for that. It might be a year before I put it out because we're still, still dialing in the ascending system and we want to figure out this capstan thing that Taylor Palmer has. Now let's cover some of the biggest risks on how not to rope jump. Things can break if you're using only a single rope and it's shitty, you could die. Somebody did die doing that. And if your rope is too long, yes, that happens and you could die. And it's really embarrassing to die if nothing fails. Think about it. Another thing that I've seen videos of is people pick jumps, jump exits that aren't clean, completely overhanging. And so they'll like do this little piddly jump and 20 feet below hit their tailbone and then rope jump the rest of it broken. So you don't want to hit anything on the way down or on the backswing or anything. There's another way you could get hurt. And then, uh, the thing that I see the most risk, at least the most apparent to me is standing near a cliff edge, not tied in. You want to have your system, that little triangle tripod we had didn't have very many clipping points. Um, but we were able to clip to it. You want to be clipped in at all times because I mean, just even hugging somebody right before they jump and you're not tied in is nuts. So there's, you're working literally all day near cliff edge, your back to it. You get comfortable. You could trip be clipped in people. If you do want to learn more about rope jumping, we now have several videos out. It's on a playlist on YouTube, but also at how not to Highline in a blog format. So we explain to you kind of the progression of our journey and where we're trying to go with it. And we have the videos in between and describe how each video can inform you in different ways. We do some that really focus on how it's set up and others that really focus on the forces and every rope jumps different. So please don't use the forces you see in this video as the standard for your rope jump. And one little disclaimer, this was not at the GGBY festival. It was before the festival and we just had the net up and use the net to connect the rope jumps. Uh, if you want to go to the GGBY festival, you go to ggbygathering.org in order to go to a Highline festival that is around Thanksgiving each year. It is a pretty awesome festival, but currently we cannot have rope jumping at that festival because well, it just adds a layer of complication to the permit and our insurance. This channel is sponsored by no one. So we started a coffee business and you can go to brewjono.com. We've made really great high-end espresso and freeze dried it. And so all you have to do is open a packet, add hot water, and it's super convenient, great for backpacking, great for every day. So go to brewjono.com, get a coffee subscription every month. It really helps this channel out because no, I don't make money on YouTube. This is a fun hobby and you need millions and millions of subscribers before you can quit your day job. Instead of smashing your face on a rock on the backswing of a rope swing, make sure you smash that like button. Don't forget to follow, like, and subscribe on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook because I'm posting stuff all the Cheers. You always look good, Andy. Oh, it's a video. Just so you guys know, this is how not to highline. ------- innovating, creating. This is Base Jump Moab right here. If you want to fall off cliffs, hang out with him. If you want to stay on top of ropes, hang out with me. That's what I'm saying. Thanks for watching, but please don't be an idiot and try to go highlining or climbing or repeat the stunts you see on this channel without going with someone who knows what they're doing. These sports come at a very high risk, but can be done safely, and that's what this channel is devoted to, helping you understand what you're looking at when you do get the chance to learn from somebody in person. We have tons of resources. They're all free and they're all at hownottohighline.com. We have the Bolting Bible, which we just finished, the 2.02 version, 2020 version, and it's 133 pages, 426 photos, 216 links that work. It's super thorough if you want to learn bolting. We also have Highline University International, which is all free courses now, and Highlining 101 is done, how to use a highline that's already rigged, and we are doing the anchors and rigging and rope jumping and space nets and more simultaneously with a large group of people now that we've made this open source. It's going to be just like the Bolting Bible. It's going to have lots of photos, lots of links, and literally everything on the topic. We also have a way to get you plugged into the Slackline community. We have a list of Facebook groups on slackademics.com that you can hit control F, find your area, and find the groups that all coordinate when and where they're going Slacklining so you can get connected with our Slack family. Another free book we have on hownottohighline.com is the book of Slack. There is some Slack religious stuff at the beginning because we think that's funny, but the rest of it is about flow state and about the history of Slackline. It's a thorough, deep book. It's awesome. Go check that out. No, I don't make money on YouTube. You need millions of subscribers just to make a living at it. I do this for a fun hobby and because I really want the information that I wish I had when I started available for the next generation. We believe that safe information should not be withheld for only those who can afford it, but it does cost thousands of dollars a year to run this channel. Bullbusters cost me like $10,000, Slack snapping cheap, and the websites cost money and yada, yada. If you're watching all the episodes, please become a Patreon on patreon.com. If you take the courses, please donate $20 if you've gone all the way through and benefited from it. If you read the entire Bolting Bible, learned how to bolt, and bolted something without having to go through a learning curve, wasting money, please donate 20 bucks on PayPal. We literally only survive off of donations for this channel. I did recently start a specialty instant coffee business with my friend. It's great for camping. It's great for van life. It's great for everyday drinking. It's really great espresso. We freeze dry it. All you have to do is add water and you can get our coffee at brewjuno.com and make sure you like us on Facebook and follow us on Instagram and subscribe to us on YouTube because we are posting stuff all the time and don't forget to smash that like button. Cheers.