How to Slackline! - Falcon Guides

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walking world famous as an act in the Ringling Brothers Circus. At a performance of the Flying Wallendas in Acron, Ohio, in 1935, a guy wire came loose, causing Helen Wallenda to lose her balance and fall from the top of the pyramid. She was miraculously saved by Karl, who stunned the crowd by catching her between his legs as he hung from the high wire by both hands. After that, wire walking was largely ignored by the press until Philippe Petit illegally rigged and walked a wire between the Twin Towers in 1974. After nearly ten months of planning, Petit and a few trusted accomplices snuck into the Towers disguised as construction workers and shot the wire from one tower to the other using a bow and arrow. Petit walked the line at dawn on the morning of August 7 and, in his words, “linked [the towers] for eternity.” Slackline On the opposite side of the country, in Yosemite Valley, California, the story of balance was taking a different path, toward what we now know as slacklining. Modern slacklining evolved here from the rich climbing culture. To challenge themselves and improve their balance, rock climbers experimented by walking on chains, slackwires, climbing rope, and, eventually, webbing. Pat Ament and others had been walking slackwires and ropes since as early as the 1960s in a Yosemite Valley campground called Camp 4, and the story of their coming home from long days at the crag to balance on chains around this campground has attained the status of legend in the slacklining community. The camp is still there; sadly, the chains and slackwires are not. Slackwires and slackchains seemed to be unique to Yosemite Valley, but even there the activity remained nameless until Jeff Ellington and Adam Grosowsky found a way to rig tubular webbing and add tension with what is now called the “primitive system” or the “Ellington system.” A precursor to today’s pulley and ratcheting systems, the Ellington utilizes search and rescue techniques, replacing pulleys with climbing carabiners to create a mechanical advantage. In 1985 Scott Balcom broke Philippe Petit’s record for highest line (formerly the Twin Towers at 1,368 feet), rigging and walking the famous Lost Arrow Spire Highline. Perched between a granite cliff and delicate finger of stone some 2,890 feet above Yosemite Valley, this highline has become the most famous and sought after in the world. Now slackline athletes are pushing the limits every day. In 2008 professional climber, slackliner, and BASE jumper Dean Potter jumped from a highline wearing a parachute. Dean performed the stunt over a canyon in Moab, Utah, calling it the world’s first BASEline (in which you make a BASE jump off a highline). Another important figure in the history of slacklining is Andy Lewis. Following in Potter’s footsteps, Lewis free soloed the Lost Arrow Spire Highline and BASE jumped from a highline in Moab, not far from the location of Dean’s original BASEline. Andy’s career took off when he landed the first ever slackline backflip in 2006. Footage of his Squirrel Backflip went viral, appearing in a Nike commercial and inspiring trickliners around the world. Lewis invented most of the tricks performed at competition level today including the double drop-knee, the modern butt-bounce, and the chest-bounce. He also hosted one of the first ever tricklining competitions in Humboldt County, California, in 2008. The Humboldt Classic is still held in California every year. Around this time competitive slacklining started to shape and expand the slackline community, similar to rock climbing or skateboarding. In 2007 Robert and Jan Kaeding developed the first simplified slackline kit in Germany and started the first slacklining company—Gibbon Slacklines. Gibbon focused on building the slacklining community with events and slackline competitions. The Introduction xv
The first ever World Cup Series in Brixen, Italy, 2010 a n d y l e w i s c o l l e c t i o n high-tension slackline kits were really the beginning of high-level tricklining. For the first time, athletes from many nations were meeting each other at competitions like the Slackline World Cup in Germany. The Internet also played a large part in the rapid growth of slacklining. Slackliners all over the world used forums, social networking, and YouTube to share knowledge about tricks as well as rigging. Youth and adults in Japan, South America, Europe, the United States, and Canada started contributing their tricks both in person and online, allowing the World Cup to become a truly global event. As tricklining evolved and competition tricklining started introducing increasingly challenging and technical tricks drawn from skating and parkour, the sport moved beyond its sideshow status and became something Americans wanted to get better at. Since 2008 the number of people slacklining in the United States has more than tripled. The first Gibbon World Cup was held in 2011 in the United States, and other competitions are xvi Introduction held by groups like the San Diego Slackers and Slackline Visions in Colorado. Slackline clubs are forming on college campuses like Ann Arbor, Berkeley, and the University of Colorado. There are now slackliners in almost every nation in the world, and people are drawn to the sport because it’s cheap, accessible, and exciting. Tightrope walking is not just for circus performers anymore. The Evolution of Gear It all started with rope walking. Men and women were once brave enough to trust their lives to handmade hemp rope suspended high above the ground. Rope walking is the true mother of slacklining. Like slackliners, rope walkers used ropes simply anchored at each end, with no guy wires and no pole for stabilization. This was the only way to perform aerial acts until 1800, when steel cable was invented. Steel cable brought the advent of what most people think of today as “tightrope walking,” a word that is generally misused. The performers you think of as tightrope artists are actually not walking on rope at all, but a wire. The wire is a steel cable anchored not only at each end, but also from guy wires attached at intervals along the wire. These smaller wires stabilize the line and prevent most side-to-side movement. Guy wires effectively separate a highwire into several shorter sections. So while a 100-foot slackline is much more difficult to walk than a 15-foot slackline, a 100-foot highwire avoids this problem by dividing the line into shorter lengths. Synthetic nylon was invented in 1935, but it took a long time for climbers to discover its utility as a balance line. The 1960s and 1970s saw a huge increase in the popularity of climbing in the United States as well as advances in the technology available to climbers. One particular mountaineering method, known as the Tyrolean traverse, is probably the origin of the first slackline rigging. If a team of mountaineers needs to cross a large gap between
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