A brief history of the sport of Slackline

The gear and knots are all borrowed from rock climbing. Sometime around '78, rock climbers first had the idea of stringing up nylon webbing and walking on. Slackline evolved effortlessly throughout the climbing community. No one can say for certain who was the first to walk on nylon webbing. Climbing and slackline go hand-in-hand so it was a natural progression.

In the beginning story has it that there were these two guys in Yosemite Valley messing around, balancing on a parking lot chain on a rainy day. Scott Balcom was camping out in the parking lot at Yosemite Valley with friends Darrin and Chris. It was the early eighties. Chongo was there too and their paths would cross.

These young individuals took this concept of balancing and made it their life. They would spend the next several years nurturing each other in community, developing the activity of slacklining or balancing and walking on nylon webbing and sharing it with others. The sky was the limit!

Today their paths have taken separate directions yet they remain united in the practice of a sport they love and in purpose; continuing to spread the seeds of slackline around the world.

Some of the original slackers insist that the shorter simpler lines are more fun. Not every one is going to want to walk the Lost Arrow Spire.

The shorter, thinner, looser lines that slackers ride from side to side like a skateboarder in a half pipe, with a minimum of gear in their tightening system, we like to refer to as: the School of Scott. Named after Scott Balcom, slackline innovator and to this day has the smoothest style around.

Even though Scott was the first to walk the Lost Arrow Spire he now prefers to walk about a forty foot long, seven sixteenths wide line called Super Tape. It stretches so much that he has to set his system up about six feet high at the ends so he does not touch the ground while standing in the middle of the line. This is a very challenging line to walk because it is thin, stretches so much and its fast! Scott likes to "ride" the line or swing the line from side to side.

While all this was going on, another story was unfolding...
Historical Note by Joseph Healy:] Adam Grosowsky grew up in Carbondale, IL where his parents taught at SIU. Somewhere around his 16th birthday (75-76 or so) he comes up to our apartment and attempts to rouse us out of the previous night's partying. He finally gets us up and shows us a picture that simply says "circus performers - circa 1890's". It shows a picture of a guy doing a one-hand handstand on a flag pole using his body to counterbalance a wire with a wristloop that goes down to a brick wall at a 45 degree angle. There is another guy doing an angled handstand in the middle of the wire. Go figure, but it was this picture that inspired Adam to learn to walk. So we did all sorts of ridiculous things to get ready to replicate this stunt as Adam gets us all practicing walking. But by the time he can do handstands on the line we decide we're all too old to do a one-hand handstand on flagpole even if we could figure out how you get up there dragging a wire and mount into one.

By the time we scattered from Southern Illinois in the '78 or so, Adam, Jim Tangen-Foster, Alan Carrier, and myself - basically the entire So. Ill. crew - were all completely versed in walking rope and webbing and doing various tricks. Fortunately we all left town and Adam ended up in Evergreen College in WA where he met Jeff and they took to walking the railings high up on the dorms and parking structures. They eventually rigged a good high wire setup in the woods and got good on it. Once on a visit there we worked pretty hard on running and jumping on to an 11mm climbing rope line cranked down with double pulleys; painful, but we figured it out.

Shortly after that they went down to do the Lost Arrow in Yosemite. Later Adam moved to Eugene, Oregon and Jeff to Bend, Oregon and Adam started doing the Monkey at Smith Rocks. He had both a wire and several webbing lines for the Monkey. I believe he talked about doing the Monkey initially so he'd have the ground clearance to try pushing a full tube swinging side-to-side as he'd taken some pretty wicked falls from above the horizontal on a lawn rig.

That brings us to the other school, the school of long lines, doubled lines and high lines or: the School of Darrin...

Darrin Carter is the second slacker to ever walk the, "Lost Arrow Spire" (LAS) and has been pushing the envelope of Slackline for at least the past ten years.

Doubled lines (1" tubular nylon webbing with another smaller nylon line threaded through the center of it), which Scott and Darrin developed the threading of lines to stack the odds in their favor when they decided to elevate.

Darrin has made the air space between the LAS and the rim of Yosemite Point 2,800 ft. above "Valley Floor" his domain. Darrin has dedicated countless hours to his craft and is to some, "the worlds greatest slackliner." Darrin put Slackline in the Guinness Book of World Records with his walk of LAS in the summer of 1998. He has also been featured on several TV programs and was most recently sighted walking between buildings in Long Beach, CA.

Dean Potter, climber extraordinare, is following in Darrin's footsteps and becoming the fourth slacker to walk LAS (Chongo was the third) and has walked high-lines in Utah and Mexico. He too has graced the pages of magazines while slacking off! Check him out in Eric Pearlmans latest video "Masters of Stone V."

Meantime in Yosemite Valley, Chongo presides over "Chongo Nation," preaching the gospel of Slackline from the practice lines at "camp four" or a place called the "Rostrum," a popular highline spot with the new generation of slackers Dean, Mat, Cedar, Noah, Leo, Brayden and the Euros to name a few.

This new generation has joined the ranks of Slackline pioneers and other enthusiasts, bringing attention to this very worth while endeavor of slacking off whenever possible for the world to marvel and enjoy!