It's barely 5.30 in the morning. As the sun rises above the horizon, against the shadows of the hills and the low lying cloud, the first rays of the day are magnificent.
“We have to go,” says Alex, drawing to a close our moment of admiration for the dawn. The previous evening, we’d been tensioning a 180 meter highline when a strong wind began to blow. Funnelling through the gully between the two cliffs it was impossible for us to finish rigging the line as one of the two anchor points was forced dangerously close to the rocks. Neither of us slept that night. We didn’t know if we’d find our line still in position by morning.
We are in the Alburni Mountains of southern Italy and we’re way off any tourist trail. These mountains, are known as the Dolomites of Campania and, apart from herders, mushroom pickers and few local hikers, no one comes up here, making the massif a fully-fledged wilderness just steps away from civilisation.
