North Shore Rescue wants slackliners to be aware of potentially deadly hazards to their helicopter crews.
The warning comes after the society received a photo of someone slacklining between two peaks in a dangerous location on Mount Strachan, above the Cypress Ski Resort.
North Shore Rescue search manager Mike Danks told Global News it is a prime area where they operate and slacklines are very hard to see and an aircraft would most certainly crash if it came into contact with the line.
“It’s quite scary because we were up flying all day yesterday and if we came in contact with that slackline it would have been catastrophic — that’s five people that would have been killed. So it’s just really important that we address this issue now before it happens again without people being in the loop,” he said.
Danks added that slackline issues are becoming a growing problem and anyone setting them up at higher elevations needs to notify crews.
The person who set up that particular slackline has since called North Shore Rescue to apologize but Danks said people need to be alerted about the dangers and everyone — the slackline community, landowners and air operators — need to be brought into the conversation.
Slacklining is when a piece of rope is strung between two anchor points and someone runs, walks or balances across it.