I’ll add some text here in a few hours, but for now, the video is up. Sorry it took a few extra months to finish editing it because of my school schedule!

It’s taken a few months, but this is the climax of our longline video series.  Here’s where we get into all the nuts and bolts of how to actually get your line tight in a safe manner.  First off, I should say, there are ways to do this that don’t involve pulleys.  In the interest […]

This video is a fairly short one because there’s far too much to address related to webbing to get it all into one video. Instead, I am going to cover a couple of important and mostly universal topics, and then leave the specifics (tubular, flat, nylon, polyester, etc) to a series of individual webbing review […]

I’ve heard conflicting theories about what water (from rain, from wet feet, etc) does to standing tension of a slackline. Mostly these theories look at nylon lines, which are hydrophilic (meaning they easily soak up water). Polyester is hydrophobic, so there is less concern there, as it’s difficult to saturate polyester with water. We know […]

Knots and line lockers You have to attach the line to the anchor sling (and your tightening system) somehow.  Since the beginning, slackliners were tying knots and using hitches to rig their lines. Sometime in the early-to-mid 2000s, the use of a chain-link line locker became popular. These reduce the ‘folds’ in the webbing, allowing […]

This will be the easiest topic for us to cover, because there really isn’t that much to talk about.  We need to discuss the different types of anchor slings, and the different ways you can rig them.  In a broad sense, the two types of slings are “homemade” and “manufactured”.  Homemade slings are anything you […]

I’m always improving little aspects of my slackline setup, and in early 2010 I realized that the towel strips I was using would be way better if they were tubes instead of strips.  I started using duct tape to make them into tubes, and then eventually began to sew them.  The strips fray and give […]

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 (that I […]

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 expectations. Between […]

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 practice session […]

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 yet […]

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 Ghana I […]

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.

So I finally got around to editing a video on how to rig a primitive line. If you’d like the pictorial version of this, see [here].  Some other useful posts (with skills utilized in this video) include [using a line locker] and [making anchor slings].  If you want to know how to get the line […]