MOUNTAIN LIFE - Blue Mountains | Fall 2017

20 ML BLUE FALL 2017 UP FRONT There are two reactions to highlining: one is that the guys are totally crazy, they’re stupid and they have a death wish. The other is that it’s super cool and I want to know more. At Mountain Life we are definitely the latter. Watching guys walk along a highline a hundred feet above Georgian Bay is incredible. And spending a few evenings with these guys, it’s obvious they aren’t (ahem) slacking on the safety. “We have redundancies,” says Greg Fishell. “Every safety precaution is doubled up.” The line itself is doubled up, the tether is doubled up, the anchors are doubled up. Basically everything that can go wrong is accounted for, making highlining a relatively safe pastime. Slacklining came about in the late 1970s as climbers started playing around with webbing in camp. They soon took the webbing to more and more dramatic peaks, and highlining was born. Greg Fishell has been slacklining for five years now. He started just like everyone else: on a piece of webbing strung between a couple of trees. But since then, he’s taken the steps to get the knowledge and the skills to progress upwards. “I pretty much only highline now,” he says from his winter home in Flagstaff, Arizona. “Pretty much anything over 100 feet off the ground is highlining. I’m going today. I go at least once a week.” His buddies from Toronto, Henry Galas and Keaton McCallum, came to the sport a little later than Fishell, but they’re also very capable and joined in on his Georgian Bay mission. While they weren’t the first people to rig up this specific location, they were the first ones to “send it” (walk the entire length of the line without falling). But the holy grail of their time on Georgian Bay was a 94-metre long crossing from one section of the Niagara Escarpment to another. With nothing “When I’m cruising along a 300- foot line and I’m in that locked zone, I am beyond happy.” HIGHER PURPOSE: ONTARIO’S LONGEST HIGHLINE RECORD SET Greg Fishell finds his Zen. COLIN FIELD