A retired English professor, Rae Raptor is one of the world’s oldest highliners and a pioneer of more than twenty-five new highlines on three continents. She is the author of Step by Step: A Memoir of Aging, Fear, and Finding Faith 300 Feet Off the Ground and speaks on reinvention, aging, balance, fear, and faith through the lens of highlining.

Rae’s two lifelong loves are reading and nature, and much of her life has been an attempt to integrate the two.

She was born Cheryll Acton in Bozeman, Montana to adventurous parents. Her father, Loren Acton, flew aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1985. She grew up in Palo Alto, California and lived through strict water rationing during an extended drought.

Concerned about the environment, Rae studied the sciences in college until the day she caught herself reading a novel instead of preparing for her biochemistry final. In her senior year at UC Davis, she switched majors to English.

After a 3,000-mile bicycle trip through the Rocky Mountains, Rae followed a boyfriend to Gunnison, Colorado, where she considered various vocations—waitress, window washer, freelance writer. English professor seemed like the best fit.

Toward that end, she earned an MA at Western Colorado University in Gunnison before pursuing a PhD at Cornell in upstate New York. While at Cornell, she joined forces with other scholars exploring the relationship between culture and nature.

In 1990 the University of Nevada, Reno hired Rae to be the nation’s first professor of Literature and Environment. Within months of moving to Reno, she met Steve Glotfelty in a climbing gym, fell in love, and got married.

As Cheryll Glotfelty, she co-founded the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, publishing and speaking widely in the emerging field of Environmental Humanities. Her love of teaching was reflected in many awards, including CASE-Carnegie Nevada Teacher of the Year.

All the while, she and Steve were rock climbing and exploring backcountry Nevada.

At sixty Professor Glotfelty retired and took up slacklining to maintain balance in older age. Step by step, slacklining became her passion. Smitten, she aspired to highline—slacklining at dizzying heights, over gorges and canyons. At this time, she adopted the alter-ego “Rae Raptor” in a bid to become bolder and braver.

What began as a search for balance and self-mastery eventually exposed a spiritual hunger. Her lifetime of striving had been for what?  After some missteps, she turned to Jesus Christ and learned to anchor her identity in God’s love rather than in her achievements.

Thus began a new adventure that continues to this day.

Rae and Steve live at Scorpion Acres in the desert north of Reno. They have one married daughter, Rosa, and new grandson, Walker. They share quarters with a donkey, two horses, two cats, and some goldfish. At 68, she still slacklines.