If you visit the Stawamus Chief, you may notice people crossing the gullies on lines suspended in the air, not even half the width of one of their feet.
The Squamish mountain has some iconic highline spots that people like Aidan Middleton have been visiting for ages. But even with years of experience under his belt, the area has a highlining history that goes back long before his time.
“There [are] some older highliners who have passed now, who established lines on the Chief that we still walk today,” Middleton said. “There [are] echoes of history there for the sport.”
But Middleton and his friends wanted to try something a bit different from what the pre-existing lines had to offer — instead of rigging their line to trees on either side of a gully, they wanted to go perpendicular to an existing line, having the end point be a net suspended in the open air at the intersection.
This is documented in A Line to Nowhere, a short film streaming online from November 12–December 8 as part of the Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival. Middleton, a UBC alum, directed the film and put together the group of Squamish and Vancouver highliners featured in the project.
Middleton didn’t start slacklining until he began studying at UBC in 2015 and joined the slacklining club that existed at the time. They would set up lines between the perfectly-aligned trees behind IKB and encourage anyone to come out and get involved, regardless of experience level — even Middleton couldn’t take a single step on the line the first time he tried it out.
Now, rather than the dirt floor right below him, there are many, many metres between him and the ground.
Highlining and slacklining are essentially the same thing — walking across a one to two inch wide line that’s rigged to two surfaces so you can travel between them — but highlining is done with a leash at a greater height. It definitely appears more intense, but Middleton doesn’t think so.
“It looks really extreme and dangerous, but it is quite safe,” said Middleton. “We take safety very seriously.”
He was careful to resist the urge to stretch the truth and instead depicted highlining for exactly what it is — the film doesn’t exaggerate the thrill factor of the sport, because if gear is set up properly, there isn’t actually that high of a risk factor in doing it.
“For some sports that makes total sense … you should dramatize the danger a little. People should understand. But with slacklining, I don't want to be like, ‘We could die at any second walking on a razor's edge,’ because that's just not what it is at all.”
The entire film is shot on a hand-cranked camera from the ‘50s that Middleton picked up from a thrift store near his place. Using it was meant as a bit of a gimmick — the film is “instant nostalgia bait,” as Middleton put it — but the crackling and shifting gives a timeless quality that lends itself more to home video footage than a film, in the best way possible.
“You watch climbing videos from the ‘50s, when they're first doing these ascents of El Capitan, or any of these things. It has this feeling of timelessness. It doesn't matter when it happened,” said Middleton.
“People have always loved doing this, going out and being with people that they care about, and going after their sort of ridiculous goals in the woods or elsewhere.”
Community, Middleton said, is a buzzword that people love to throw around — but it’s truly one of the most integral features of slacklining as a practice. The clips of the slackliners drawing up plans on a whiteboard propped up in the trunk of an SUV and beaming at each other as they run through the trees while rigging the line are almost more captivating than actually watching them walk the line.
There’s an adrenaline rush that comes out of being suspended in the air with almost nothing supporting you, but like the film emphasizes, the most crucial step in setting up a line is making sure you have a cool spot to hang out with friends at the end of it.
“It's that feeling of being alone and depending on yourself, but then also having your friends back on either side waiting for you. Everyone works together to put this thing up, and then everybody walks by themselves and reaches their own individual goals.”
A Line to Nowhere is available to stream online here until December 8.
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