Two brothers from San Francisco say they have set a record for the longest highline ever walked in both Yosemite National Park and California, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Earlier this month, they and a group of friends spent nearly a week stringing a single, 2,800-foot-long line from Taft Point west across a series of gulleys that plunge 1,600 feet, per the AP. Moises and Daniel Monterrubio, brothers who are training to be rope-access technicians, had been thinking about crossing that void for a year. “Every time we’d go out there, we’d think about that line,” Moises Monterrubio, 26, told the Chronicle. Highlining is high-altitude slacklining, in which a narrow strip of strong, nylon webbing—usually an inch wide and a few millimeters thick—is strung between two anchor points and serves as a kind of balance beam.
Over the course of six days earlier this month, the Monterrubios used the help of 18 friends and fellow highliners to navigate their webbing and set their two anchors. It all came together at sunset June 10: The line was set, the brothers were ready, and the honor was theirs. Daniel, 23, walked the line first and fell three or four times in the wind but made it across. (In a highlining fall, walkers remain attached with a harness, but they have to haul themselves back up to balance or shimmy back to an anchor point while dangling upside down.) Moises went next, falling twice on his initial trek. The longest line walked in Yosemite had been a 954-footer extending from Taft Point to an anchor east. The brothers and their friends received permission from national park staffers in advance.
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