I was at REI the other day and happened to notice a spool of camouflage webbing in the climbing department. Typically REI is not known for its adventurous webbing selection — Bluewater makes several colors of webbing yet green and purple are consistently the only two the REI stocks (possibly the two most boring [...]

If you’ve spent any amount of time on this site you probably know I am a fan of line-lockers. They keep the webbing flat, protect it reasonably well, and for nylon webbing typically ensure about 95% of rated strength (instead of the 50 or 65% that a knot might). The first line lockers [...]

Chongo mount is a technique employed to get up on the line from the side, primarily used in remounting highlines after a fall, or for any other line from the mantle position (for instance, a 7- or 8-foot-high slackline).
I taught myself to Chongo before I knew what it was, and without any real guidance. [...]

August 27 and 28 we rigged a 70ft slackline between the footbridge and the cape that makes up much of South Lake Union Park in Seattle. Probably a dozen or so different slackers came out, plus a few folks gave it a shot despite never having slacklined. Overall, this line far exceeded my [...]

It used to be that “slackline” meant any one-inch tubular rock climbing webbing pulled reasonably taut so that it could be walked by a human. Then people started using Type18 flat webbing. Then polyester webbings. Then 2-inch flat and tubular webbing. And so on. Rigging methods now involve not just [...]

Gibbon USA invited me to be an official judge for the Gibbon Games in Salt Lake City, UT, and I couldn’t be happier. Overall the experience was amazing, and I had a chance to not only catch up with old friends but make many, many new ones. The video at right contains some [...]

The Stranger is running an article on the emerging slackline debacle that kicked off a week or so ago when a security officer stopped me in Cal Anderson park and insisted slacklining was illegal. I posted the details previously, and to briefly summarize: the police were called, slacklining is not illegal, does not (in [...]

After the whole fully-public ordeal with the legalization of slackline in Seattle, many people have written to me privately asking for suggestions or sharing of whatever resources I may have in order to assist them in pursuing a similar course of action in their own communities. Unfortunately some of you are up against a [...]

I’ve written about some access issues and confusion with parks employees in Seattle as long ago as 2009. This has mostly been an isolated issue. In the last three weeks, several people from our community have been ejected from parks around Washington.

On July 24, 2011, while slacklining at Cal Anderson park, I had [...]

Sometimes deals can be found on webbing from obscure vendors, sometimes not; I ended up with 60ft of milspec this way once after ordering 60ft of Type18. Of course the vendor refunded me and told me to keep the webbing, so maybe that wasn’t such a bad deal.
Just before we left for [...]

Well, we’ve been in Ghana almost a week and finally got a chance to get a slackline up. Many parts of the beaches here are deforested from animals and people foraging food and fire wood, but we found a section of the beach in Cape Coast west of the resort areas that looks like [...]

We’re headed to Africa, primarily to film a nation-wide measles inoculation campaign in Ghana, but we plan to bring a bunch of slackline gear, both as a way to pass the time and as a way to meet and connect with new people in West Africa.  Pretty much everything else that needs saying is covered [...]

I’ve had a couple of requests for a “howto” on rigging a two-inch line, sans ratchet, so here it is. Basically we’re just line-locking in a short piece of one-inch webbing (usually about 10ft will do it) and then making a primitive system with it. So if you already know how to do [...]

At Mary Helen’s suggestion we made a quick tutorial showing a few different turning styles (and with commentary from the respective slackliners). I hope this helps newer slackers get a better idea of the various ways to approach turns.

Martin came down from Vancouver today and we spent about 4 hours rigging a 500ft line at Marymoor park.  Due to the line being new and inexplicably stretchy we had some difficulty getting the stretch-factor right, even after bumping from 10% to 15% we were still way off (we closed the pulleys at 15% [...]

I got an e-mail from a reader asking if we could do a tutorial on multi-directional lines (triangles, pentagons, etc). Luckily today was our mid-May meetup, so I whipped up a 3-way line and brought the camera. Here’s a quick video howto and some shots of the line in action.

Thanks to everyone who came out today.  We had a wide variety of lines (including an 80ft from Jim and a triangle line!).  This was the third nice day of the year and it feels as if summer is right around the corner.  We all had a ton of fun, made a few more slackline [...]

Today marks the first installment in our “destructive testing” series.  The purpose of this series of posts is to investigate what happens when stuff breaks, and how much force it takes to make stuff break.  Safety is my number one concern, and my hope is that these experiments will help everyone to better understand how [...]

Recently I saw someone rigging a “primitive” slackline with five carabiners (one on the static end, and four for the tension system). The “elegant friction lock” method I use was also not being employed. Basically this is as far as you can get from how I setup my primitive systems and still be [...]

This site’s been around for almost two years now, and has always looked like a “blog.” That worked plenty fine for a while, but we’ve finally reached the point where we have so much content to display, and so many viewers trying to find various bits of info, that it makes sense to take [...]