Cut Him Some Slack

Edward Yates is high.

He's a thousand feet above the ground, the narrow webbing between his toes swaying back and forth, up and down. If he can walk 110 feet in a straight line, he will have conquered the Rostrum highline in Yosemite National Park.

Rostrum is a monument of slacklining. It's more akin to mountain biking the slickrock of Moab than climbing the north ridge of Mt. Everest: The logistics of getting there are fairly simple, but flawless execution is what separates the wheat from the chaff.

Edward Yates is the wheat.

photo "You can't feel any more exposure than you can on a highline. It's 360 degrees of total air." -Edward Yates

Yates was 20 years old when a friend in Boone, North Carolina introduced him to slacklining. Like many college sophomores versed in critical thinking, he voiced his first impression: "That's kinda stupid."

Stupid or not, slacklining was a new challenge. The abundance of trees in both Boone and Chattanooga offered plenty of opportunities to practice, and soon he was more than proficient.

"I mastered it after six or seven months," Yates says. "I wasn't doing some of the stuff I do now, but I was hooked."

Yates quickly became as good as the friend who taught him, and then better. He began to ask about changing things up, bouncing on the line - things his friend told him weren't possible. Soon, he was "inventing tricks - jumping onto the line, doing a 180, stuff like that."

He knows now that he wasn't "inventing" tricks; rather, he was discovering the natural evolution of slacklining alongside other early adopters. Much like sidewalk surfing in the '70s turned into skateboarding in empty swimming pools all over southern California, this modern-day derivative of tightrope walking grew out of a desire to test the limits.

"The sport has advanced super quickly in the last 10 years," Yates points out. Newer materials and a larger pool of participants mean that people are pushing boundaries more than ever.

Now 28, Yates is still something of a big fish in a small pond. Making the jump from slacklining a few feet off the ground to spanning a gorge takes talent, patience, dedication and a little disregard for personal safety. He says that "there aren't many people - maybe 100, 150 in the world" who regularly traverse lines as lengthy as he does.

Highlining also takes a willingness to accept failure.

In this sport, letdowns come in two varieties: You can fail to walk the full length of the line, or you could potentially fall to your death. Yates is still very much alive, which means he has to deal with his few incomplete walks.

photo Edward Yates pauses while climbing a route to watch Jimmy Schwartz take his first steps on a slackline above the Tennessee River Gorge.

"I've really only failed one or two lines," Yates says, without a hint of braggadocio. "I can do pretty much any line if I have enough time on it. The one in Asia, man...I just didn't have enough time."

Even close to home, time isn't always on the extreme highliner's side. Stringing a 100-foot-plus line usually involves at least one friend, a bow and arrow to launch the line to your intended target, a few hours (or days) to cut limbs and clear the path, and the patience to correct mistakes along the way.

One-inch nylon tubular webbing is the standard in highlining. It is strength-tested to 4,000 pounds and, when strung properly, holds just enough tension to provide a trampoline effect. Yates uses industrial-grade harnessing equipment to lash himself to the line, combining shackles and lever hoists that are designed to lift the engine out of a car.

"You have to be confident in your equipment," Yates says. He even incorporates backup anchors set at lower tensions, which are practically guaranteed not to fail.

But a simple oversight - like leaving the nylon webbing out in the sun - could lead to the line snapping like a brittle, dry-rotted rubber band. "We leave lines up for months...sometimes you go back and can't even walk it. We strung this one up right before winter," Yates says. "That's a bad time to do it."

Yates didn't walk that line before bad weather set in. Right now, it's nagging at him as one of his few failures. In all likelihood, when he goes back to conquer it, he'll have to redo the whole setup.

An engineer by trade, Yates has the know-how to rig up lengthy lines that would meet international safety standards - if such standards existed. It's still a loosely organized sport, and the many varieties of slacklining would make it difficult to enact any governance. Chances are, most slackliners aren't naturally drawn to rules and regulations.

"More people are doing tricklining. Still not really in town, but internationally tricklining has gotten huge," Yates says. Tricklining, which Yates used to practice more often, assigns point values to different maneuvers. The classic game of chicken pits two competitors head-to-head, like slackline sumo wrestling: Simply shake the other guy off the line, and you win.

But "highlining takes it to the next level," according to Yates. "You can't feel any more exposure than you can on a highline. It's 360 degrees of total air."

photo Edward Yates tapes together the two pieces of nylon webbing that will support him as he walks through the air. One piece of webbing is tensioned to be able to walk on while the other is left looser to serve as a safety backup.

He practices highlining, his current specialty, with a level of dedication that's best described as blue-collar professional. "I'm not getting paid, but I'm taking it to extreme levels," Yates says. "I just want to progress all the time."

To that end, he practices during lunch breaks at his secret spot. It's simultaneously work and play, and he considers himself fortunate to have abandoned his initial indifference. Now, he has a wealth of experience that only comes to those who are willing to try something new.

"A lot of my lines are some of my greatest life accomplishments," Yates says. "But I just do it for the love."

The beauty of slacklining is that it can be done anywhere. All it requires is a line and two fixed points. These days, it's hard to drive through a college town without seeing barefoot 20-somethings wavering precariously over the grass in the quad. "When I started off doing it, we just rigged it between two trees using carabiners to pull it tight," Yates recalls.

And plenty of practitioners are content to leave it at that. "It's an amazing way to escape life, and you can do it anywhere. You don't really need anything but yourself," Yates says. "It's a good social piece, too, if you have a setup at your house."

"It's great for you - your balance, your focus - and it's relatively easy to do," he insists. "It's way easier than skateboarding, way easier than rock climbing. You can learn in like two weeks, and that's only doing it for five, 10, 15 minutes, three days a week.

"Who doesn't have five minutes?"

Edward Yates has come down.

He's one of very few people to have highlined Rostrum. There are 110 feet of line behind him, 110 monumental feet. But there are thousands more feet in front of him, in his garage, on a spool, in his imagination.

Edward Yates isn't done.

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The thrill of the game

is to charge never tamed

always boosh till the end like there's no one to blame

but your self on a shelf on a line in a frame

another moment in time that is not quite the same

--Edward Yates

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