Whoa! Meet the slackliner who's teetered on lines thousands of feet in the air
By
Rina Torchinsky, AccuWeather staff writer
Updated Aug 13, 2021 7:39 AM EST
Instead of walking on thin ice, Breannah Yeh tells you how she’s managed to balance on a rope 3,000 feet above the ground.
Breannah Yeh spent all night looking for a highline rig in Sacramento, where she would be suspended over great heights and teeter across a thin line. The then-13-year-old slept in the car the night before, but at about 8 the next morning, it was time to hit the line.
“It was just like the scariest feeling in the world,” Yeh said. “You’re putting your body in this position that it doesn’t want to be in because it’s going against every single instinct.”
Yeh, who is now 24, is a professional slackliner. Her sport entails balancing on a slim piece of webbing anchored between two points. She’s been at it for 11 years and says that on top of the natural challenges that come with it, the weather can pose another collection of hiccups.
Breannah Yeh, 24, slacklines at the beach. Courtesy of Breannah Yeh.
“You kind of have to be aware of the weather, meaning if there’s too high of winds, approximately like 25 miles per hour or more, that’s like kind of getting into the zone that it starts to be pretty dangerous,” Yeh said.
Also, heat can be a real distraction.
Yeh said the "worst" conditions can be when the weather is "blazing hot and you're on these lines out there where you have to exert so much of your body to get back on the line, and you're really pushing yourself."
Highlining -- a discipline of slacklining in which athletes walk across a rope between cliffs -- has taken Yeh as high as 3,000 feet above the ground. She’s been up on the wire in places like Yosemite, Hong Kong and Moab, Utah.
After her first time highlining, Yeh said it took her years to return to it -- but she spent ample time tricklining at lower heights in the meantime. It’s something she “had to learn [to] love,” she explained.
Up on the line, Yeh said, there’s a battle between body and mind. Balancing above the ground, she reminds herself to breathe -- sometimes mouthing the words “breathe, breathe” to calm herself down. It’s meditative, she said.
“Your body is like, ‘I shouldn’t be doing this,’” Yeh mused in an interview with AccuWeather. “But then your mind is like, ‘OK, I want to be able to walk across this line.”
High above the ground, Yeh said, the air’s a bit fresher. Some slackliners say they’ve felt the change in the altitude when they’re highlining, she explained. In a tricklining competition in Vail, Colorado, Yeh remembers feeling the altitude.
Rain could make for slippery, dangerous conditions on the line, she said. And lightning could also make for a “huge target,” Yeh explained.
But despite the dangers, Yeh said she takes an abundance of precautions.
“With everything involved, there's always so much safety and so much planning that goes into stuff like this,” she said, adding that in the case anything fails on the mainline, there's a backup line in place to catch a slackliner in the event of a fall.
Keep checking back on AccuWeather.com and stay tuned to the AccuWeather Network on DirecTV, Frontier, Spectrum, FuboTV, Philo, and Verizon Fios.
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News / Sports
Whoa! Meet the slackliner who's teetered on lines thousands of feet in the air
By Rina Torchinsky, AccuWeather staff writer
Updated Aug 13, 2021 7:39 AM EST
Instead of walking on thin ice, Breannah Yeh tells you how she’s managed to balance on a rope 3,000 feet above the ground.
Breannah Yeh spent all night looking for a highline rig in Sacramento, where she would be suspended over great heights and teeter across a thin line. The then-13-year-old slept in the car the night before, but at about 8 the next morning, it was time to hit the line.
“It was just like the scariest feeling in the world,” Yeh said. “You’re putting your body in this position that it doesn’t want to be in because it’s going against every single instinct.”
Yeh, who is now 24, is a professional slackliner. Her sport entails balancing on a slim piece of webbing anchored between two points. She’s been at it for 11 years and says that on top of the natural challenges that come with it, the weather can pose another collection of hiccups.
Breannah Yeh, 24, slacklines at the beach. Courtesy of Breannah Yeh.
“You kind of have to be aware of the weather, meaning if there’s too high of winds, approximately like 25 miles per hour or more, that’s like kind of getting into the zone that it starts to be pretty dangerous,” Yeh said.
Also, heat can be a real distraction.
Yeh said the "worst" conditions can be when the weather is "blazing hot and you're on these lines out there where you have to exert so much of your body to get back on the line, and you're really pushing yourself."
Highlining -- a discipline of slacklining in which athletes walk across a rope between cliffs -- has taken Yeh as high as 3,000 feet above the ground. She’s been up on the wire in places like Yosemite, Hong Kong and Moab, Utah.
After her first time highlining, Yeh said it took her years to return to it -- but she spent ample time tricklining at lower heights in the meantime. It’s something she “had to learn [to] love,” she explained.
Up on the line, Yeh said, there’s a battle between body and mind. Balancing above the ground, she reminds herself to breathe -- sometimes mouthing the words “breathe, breathe” to calm herself down. It’s meditative, she said.
“Your body is like, ‘I shouldn’t be doing this,’” Yeh mused in an interview with AccuWeather. “But then your mind is like, ‘OK, I want to be able to walk across this line.”
High above the ground, Yeh said, the air’s a bit fresher. Some slackliners say they’ve felt the change in the altitude when they’re highlining, she explained. In a tricklining competition in Vail, Colorado, Yeh remembers feeling the altitude.
Rain could make for slippery, dangerous conditions on the line, she said. And lightning could also make for a “huge target,” Yeh explained.
But despite the dangers, Yeh said she takes an abundance of precautions.
“With everything involved, there's always so much safety and so much planning that goes into stuff like this,” she said, adding that in the case anything fails on the mainline, there's a backup line in place to catch a slackliner in the event of a fall.
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