World record: German highliner walks on rope at nearly 2,000 feet up

27-year-old German student walks across highline between two French mountains to break world record. Slackline aficionados and highline pros gathered near the village of Saint-Jeannet nestled in France's south on Sunday (May 21), to watch participants in the fifth edition of the French Riviera Highline Meeting (FRHM) attempt to set a new world record. Highlining, an extreme sport practiced by few, is an elevated variation of the so-called slacklining, which refers to the act of walking or balancing along a suspended length of flat webbing that is tensioned between two anchors. To beat the current world record of 800 metres (2625 feet) , set at the same event, thrill-seekers had to cross a highline stretched between two immense mountain cliffs, one in Saint-Jeannet and the other in Vence (France), resulting in a distance of 1,600 metres (5249 feet) at a height of more than 600 metres (1968 feet).