Scott McCrea wrote:The swing looks pretty safe to me. There is really not that much load on the tyrolean and there is so much dynamic shock absorption in the 400' of rope and the rigging the stresses are not that big.
However, I would have liked to see more edge lines and fall prevention measures. The whole pulling the swinger over to edge and having them transfer to a static rope is pretty clumsy. A 400' foot climb, with what appear to be aiders, would really suck. And, I could not see any sort of rescue option/plan. It may be that it just wasn't in the video. But, there should be a plan for how to get a swinger down, quickly. And, how to help a rope climber. And, helmets. Put on a dang helmet.
All the jumpers were wearing backpacks with rope ends in them. It didn't look like it would be near enough to get to the canyon floor, more just to keep things tidy, but it did make me wonder how far that distance was from the bottom of the swing. Come to think of it, jumping with even a couple hundred feet of rope on your back would change your center of balance enough to potentially put you head down everytime you hit the end of the swing. Keeping the jumpers as light as possible seems to be somewhat of a safety concern. i.e., don't load them down with the kind of rope it would likely take to get to the bottom, at least, not on their backs. OTOH however, I guess you could just sit on the pig and jump that way;) But who wants to reset the jump with piggy hanging on the end of the line? That isn't really an option either
Scott, jugging equipment, helmets, and pads aside, how would you have done things differently? I assume their rescue plan for rope climbers is pretty much what a caver's would have been without the option to lower. Also, how else would you get a jumper back to the lip other than pulling them over and having them changeover? I wouldn't be as concerned with that I don't think than something happening during the jump, like a rope loop around a leg or something. That could potentially put you in a bad way.
Also I'm trying to think of ways to rig for rescue with the tyrolean. There are the standard configurations, but I keep coming back to "Christ, that would be a TON of rope" Maybe they did that, but I doubt it.
Also, typically with highline setups you are walking a tensioned line, but you have a not tensioned or [i]slightly[i] tensioned back up. If I saw things correctly in the behind the scenes video it looked like four strands, two webbing and two ropes. How all that was put together is kind of unclear, hard to see. Was there just a single strand to the rigging plate for the haul over to the wall, or was it on a pulley for a 2:1? There was a brief mention of sheathing one of the backup ropes in the video as well, so it may not have been two strands of webbing at all, but rather a rope sheathed in webbing. Who knows. Anyway there was some kind of redundancy, and obviously it was safe enough. And an equalized anchor on 4 steel glue ins? No lack of burliness there. I do wish the behind the scenes video would have gone more in depth as far as the rigging, instead of listening to that annoying guy who obviously doesn't know anything about it talk about his youtube channel too much