Forces on the anchors during highline whippers at the Rostrum in Yosemite National Park

What's going to have more force when you whip? A loose line or a tight line? Check it out on this episode of How Not to Highline. I'm Ryan Jinks and welcome to Yosemite National Park. Here at the rostrum, Kim and I set up this 115 foot highline on SkyPilot from Slacklife BC. And we're going to find out if it hurts more to whip on this when it's loose or if it hurts more to whip on it when it's tight. Now it is a 10 to 14% stretch, but how much tension does affect the force on the whippers? So I'm going to volunteer myself to whip on this three times. We're going to whip close to this anchor, the middle and close to that anchor, loose, and we're going to repeat it tight. And we're going to find out on our dynamometer right there what the forces are. So we're going to test loose first because it's easier to tighten when we're done. Right now it's got 50 pounds of force or 0.26 kilonewtons. A kilonewton is about 225 pounds of force. So we're just going to do kilonewtons from this point on. Standing sag right now is only 0.26 kilonewtons right now. And then there's a weight when I'm on it. And then we're going to see what the weight is, the force when I whip. And I'm going to whip right here in the middle and over there. 1.58 kilonewtons of force. Okay, test number one. Okay, we got to 3. Oh, 4.1 when you moved, it was 3.6. And then when you moved on that last part of the whip, it went up to 4.1. Awesome. Oh, first whipper of the morning. Okay, now for the middle. Okay, that went up to 3.12. Oh, it's back up to 4.18. Okay, 3.9 on that one. So that was the least force at any fall was the other anchor. So those whippers felt like a lot of whippers on like a 100-foot line. I'm curious if a tighter line would make more of like a bungee jump field where you don't get such a shock load. But you can see how much looser this line is now. I'm at 0.6 kilonewtons on this anchor. So a lot of things either stress or whatever. But this is as loose as you'd ever really rig. And so this is a good test for this. Now let's try it tight. Okay, so Kim and I used a hang grip, a line grip and a hangover and pulled as tight as we could and almost got this to 2 kilonewtons. But then by the time I tied off my tails and all that, it's back down to 1.5 kilonewtons. So this is as tight as you can get it without a tension system. And this is, I mean, nobody these days really walks anything tighter than this anyways. So I'm going to go out there and I'm going to whip in three places again and we're going to see a standing tension of 1.5 plus my weight what that'll result in. Okay, so Ryan is getting on the high line right now and it's kind of fluctuating between 2 and 2.3 kilonewtons. I'm in a very narrow no-fall zone. Yeah, you are. I don't think I've ever whipped here. We're doing it for science. Doing it for you guys. Okay, there we go. What is it at? It's at 2.4, 4.6. There we go. So Ryan's in the middle now and we're back to 2.3 to 2.5 kilonewtons of pressure. Oh, it feels so good. I don't want to whip. Whip, whip. Folding your face. Okay, we got to 3.98, 4.62. Went to 4.4. So I'm not going to put a dyno on myself and whip mostly because I don't want to whip six more times but also because they felt the same. I didn't hurt more than one than the other. So and this after we had started with 1.5 before I got on the standing tension now is at, was at 0.5 when I got off and is now at 0.7. It's interesting how much the tension is changing when it even just sits there. But we lost almost a full kilonewton with me whipping on it a couple times and this is on SkyPilot. Obviously, it'll be different with different kinds of webbings but it was super interesting that we got similar results and it felt the same during the whips. So if you like this test, let me know in the comments below and maybe we can get some dynos on the anchors and on the leash at the same time in the future. And maybe we could try like stretchy versus static webbings at the same length on the same day and compare that. Let me know if you like this kind of test or if I should just stick with funny videos and stop trying to be Mr. Science Man. But the tensions can be all over the place as you can see so therefore you shouldn't highline. Hey, thanks for watching. But don't be an idiot and go rig your first highline after watching some guy on YouTube show you how to do it. Instead, go with somebody who knows what they're doing the first time you go out. But until you get that opportunity, watch our other videos and don't forget to subscribe.