Swing Life Away

It had been cold outside. So cold that I hadn’t gotten out and explored anything in a couple weeks. So when a friend told me that we could get into a huge active arena I figured it’d be a good place to set up a rope swing and try it out. So We stuffed a ton of rope into a bag, grabbed some cameras and headed off.

After gaining entry we made our way up the catwalk. The stamped metal plates shifted under each step and made a terrible racket. We decided that if anybody else was in the building, they must have been deaf. At the top of the catwalk we set up anchor points and lowered our ropes. The three of us then rappelled down each of our ropes. I demonstrated how one could use a fireman’s break to render a fellow climber stranded mid air when they’re on rappel. Pull on the rope below them and they cant go anywhere. Its a lot like the trick where your friend is trying to get into your car and you pull away every time he tries, eventually it loses its humor.

So there we were, at the bottom of 70 feet of rope anchored to the rafters of an arena. None of us had set up a swing like this before. I pulled two of the ropes back to the last row of seats, hooked into them both with a prussick hitch and took out the slack, backed it up with a figure 8, and bundled the extra rope. Then I took a deep breath and let myself fall forward. Gravity poured on speed quickly and in a couple seconds I was 100 feet over the front row of seats. The scary part, however, was the return swing, when you had to hope that you didn’t slam back into the chairs from whence you came.

Gradually we moved farther and farther back, climbing the press box to get more swing as we gained confidence in our anchors. Eventually We set up a swing from  the top of the box, about 40 feet above the last row of seats. I let my friend in the red shirt go first and by the time he stopped swinging and rap’d back down it was 4am. I elected to let him have prominence and we started cleaning up without my having dropped from the high spot. Thus he got bragging rights for the night, having been the only one ballsy enough to drop from the top. We undid and repacked all the ropes and decided next time we’d find the breakers for the lights so we could get better video and we’d also set up some bigger, scarier swings.