Watch Yoga Acrobatics Performed on 600-Foot Cliff
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Trimr(MOAB, Utah) — A pair of yoga athletes took on a death-defying challenge of doing yoga acrobatics while on a 600-foot cliff in Moab, Utah.
A three-minute video posted on YouTube by the Utah-based fitness company Trimr shows the yogis, Kesley Ondine and Brian Mosbaugh, performing sola and partner yoga moves, from bending over backwards to balancing on each other, often without the safety net of a harness.
“That was the moment my heart was in my throat,” the video’s creator, Trimr executive Dallin Smith, told ABC News of the moment when Ondine and Mosbaugh told him the harnesses he planned to secure them in would get in the way and make it more dangerous.
“They said, ‘Don’t worry about. We’re dialed in,’” Smith recalled. “They were locked in [mentally] the whole time. I was scared senseless.”
Smith, 29, had the idea to shoot the video as a way to visualize Trimr’s focus on the “marriage between beauty and performance” in the company’s fitness products. The company brands itself as the place where, “designers and athletes work together.”
Trimr’s founders, Gary Moore and Travis Winn, gave Smith the go-ahead to stage the shoot, saying if he could pull it off it would “phenomenal.” Smith found the perfect partners in Ondine and Mosbaugh, athletes who specialize in mountain climbing and highlining, in addition to their obvious yoga skills.
“Highlining requires an ability to completely drown out fear and drown out your surroundings,” Smith said. “That’s their training, to perform at that level while drowning everything out and conquering fear.”
The yoga term for that state of consciousness, “Asamprajnata,” is what Smith titled the video. The shoot took place last November on two different peaks in Moab over the course of three days.
“The highest peak was Witch Tower and we took an entire day before we shot just to climb and rig it,” Smith said. “On the shoot day it was about two hours for setup and we were there for probably about five hours.”
With a depth of what Smith estimates to be about 5-feet by 9-feet, Witch Tower was so narrow that no camera crew could shoot there. The entire video — two days’ worth of footage — was shot by two drones.
“We had one drone pilot on one end of the canyon and another on the other end of the canyon and we all communicated by radios,” Smith said.
The video has 26,000 views and counting. Its most breathtaking moments are a credit to the steeliness of Ondine and Mosbaugh, according to Smith.
“A lot of people can do AcroYoga and a lot are very talented, but I think there is only a handful of people in the world who can do the yoga to those heights and those extremes with essentially death on the line if something was to go wrong,” he said. “There was no room for error.”
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