Two spare minutes will take you to the Tasmanian Central Highlands and show you what we were up to earlier this year. I believe this beautiful place is call Highlands because of the great highlining opportunities.
In January I teamed up with Alex and Stepan, two awesome people and highliners from the Gold Coast and the master of words, drones, unexpected camera angles plus our chief entertainer Simon Maden from the
Vertical Life magazine.
The main objective of the trip was to visit Mt Geryon and see if a highline could be established between its wildly forked summits. Mt Geryon is an epic mountains which requires a multiple-day walk in before the actual scrambling and climbing to the summits starts. With such a small crew and the amount of equipment we needed to drag up we knew that the chances we would rig the line were pretty slim.
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| Sunset at Lake Elysia with Mt Geryon and The Acropolis in the background |
But somehow after long and sweaty days of dragging our backpacks and bodies up, scoping the possibilities for natural anchors and finally rigging the line it turn out to be a success. Stepan sent the line which is now called The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and you can check out the result of our effort on this little video which was put together by Simon over many sleepless nights and lots of coffee, a good coffee of course - he is from Melbourne.
And if you wonder why the Book of Laughter of Laughter and Forgetting here is an excerpt from
Simon's awesome post (do not forget to check it out).
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The name plays on the mix of nationalities of the expedition’s protagonists but it also carries a deeper, murkier current. Climbing, highlining, skiing, meditating, cycling, running, leaping out of planes – all of these share some commonalities, one of which is amnesia.
Forgetting has been central to the flow of time. Now though, with vast outsourced digital databases hoarding pictures and posts of things that would be perhaps better left to fade, it seems as if it is more difficult to forget than it is to remember. A perfect memory is a panopticon’s curse that changes the way we behave and leads us to self-censor. Not forgetting has weight.
An overfull past cluttered with stubborn memories is also impenetrably opaque, the volume of things making it hard to focus on that which is important. Forgetting facilitates evolution and change. Forgiveness is wrapped up with forgetting. We need to let go and forget – somethings forever and others for only moments. A good forgetory then is as important as a good memory.
Our memories are not stable, they don’t stay fixed in consciousness. You can deliberately rid yourself of them. Scrape some of them away. Walking the line (climbing the route, dropping the chute) is amnesia.
Forgetting the long uncomfortable march, the burning calves and charred quads, chafed hips, the descent of foul weather, the rising frustration at poor decisions, the quotidian life that waits off the mountain, the past, plans, the self. Being enveloped wholly in the challenge and subject to the instant visceral feedback, these are what consumes consciousness. Walking the line becomes voluntary amnesia.
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