The Ghost Inside is a great documentary about Alexander Schulz, who set a new slack lining world record when he walked a 100 meter high, 375 meter long highline between two limestone cliffs in China’s Guangxi province.
Tag: slacklining
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Meet Christian Rojek, Amazing Slackliner
Nice montage of Christian Rojek doing some slacklining. Look at those beautiful lines!
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Dean Potter Performs the First Ever BASEline
Today, extreme athlete Dean Potter posted a photo on his Instagram feed of the first ever BASEline. He balanced, with his arms spread, across thin webbing, suspended above a deep canyon. While most would do everything in their power to stay on the line, clinging for dear life, Dean Potter was there to jump off.
Dean Potter performed the first BASEline. BASElining, like it sounds, is a combination of BASE jumping and slacklining. Potter teetered across a line of webbing, wearing only his parachute pack and a pair of pants before diving into the air.
Photo from Dean Potter’s Instagram, by Jim Hurst The feat was part of the promotion and research for Steven Kotler’s new book the Rise of Superman. The book examines the point of consciousness that all extreme athletes share. “How did they do it?,” the book’s website reads. “In a word, ‘flow.’ Flow is the source code of ultimate human performance. It is a rare and radical state of consciousness where action and awareness merge, self vanishes, time slows down and major aspects of physical and mental performance skyrocket.”
With his Flow Genome Project, Kotler works to explore how this mental state allows rock climbers, snowboarders, surfers and other extreme athletes to make split-second decisions and push their bodies to the their limits.
The book goes out on March 4, 2013, but you can watch the trailer here:
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Hitting the Line: Slacklining Trend Continues to Grow
In the 70s, after climbing hard all day, exhausted rock climbers would return to camp at Yosemite National Park and look for a way to occupy the time until their next climb. With armfuls of rope, webbing and carabiners at their disposal, climbers started to slackline. They’d pull webbing tight between two trees and take turns balancing across the line. In recent years, the sport has gained momentum and popularity through competitions, taking it to new lengths by longlining, higher heights through highlining and flips and tricks through tricklining.
Due to the new demand for supplies, companies started producing nylon webbing, which resulted in a new competitive market. Gibbon Slacklines currently dominates this industry offering a range of gear from webbing of various widths to graphic T-shirts.
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Some companies are starting to take the business side of slacklining outside of gear. Dakota Collins founded Rocky Mountain Slackline LLC, filled with what he refers to as slacklining consultants. Collins’ company strives to spread the sense of balance, peace and control that he feels while balancing on a slackline. Rocky Mountain Slackline offers courses and guidance in all areas of the sport in an effort to share the fast growing trend.
Collins had only been slacklining for about a year and was in college studying sustainability, but after falling in love with the sport, he decided to take a break to go full force with his slacklining company.
“Here at Rocky Mountain Slackline, we don’t actually sell any slacklines. We’re just trying to sell the service,” said Collins. “We’re really trying to get it out there in the community and get people exposed to it so they can see what the benefits are behind slacklining.”
Rocky Mountain Slackline hopes to accomplish this through workshops, camps and clinics for everyone from recreation center workers to those involved with school and education programs. From tricklining at promotional gigs to planning a record-breaking longline trek up a mountain, Collins has his hands in virtually every aspect of the sport.
“It’s applicable to anyone’s lifestyle and whatever you’re looking to get out of it, you can,” said Collins. “Slacklining for me is therapeutic. And that’s what I’m really going after. That’s my big shabam.”
But not everyone looks as positively at slacklining. National parks worry about damaging natural resources by stripping tree bark or snapping tree trunks. City officials who work in public parks also frown upon slackliners spreading long lines across crowded areas, tripping visitors and causing bike accidents. For these reasons, it’s been banned across many parks and college campuses in both the U.S. and Canada.
Collins hopes to help overcome some of these negative connotations by teaching responsible slacklining behavior. He urges slackliners to always wrap trees, protecting both the bark and the athletes’ gear. Another solid rule Collins adheres to: never set up on a tree less than 12 inches thick in order to avoid snapping the trunk. He also strives to leave an outdoor area even cleaner than when he arrived and encourages his clients to follow suit.
“We want to show the community that it’s safe, beneficial and a new type of fitness training,” said Collins. “It’s not just some hippie, pot smoking sport.”
photo & video credit: Mike Barry, Rocky Mountain Slackline LLC
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Reporting Live: 2011 Reel Rock Film Tour
A few weeks ago, Nerve Rush HQ received an email:
I bought two tickets to the Reel Rock Film Tour…The six movies being shown look incredible.
I hopped on over to the website and found this trailer:
Boom goes the dynamite–I was in. Waiting in line, I realized I should have gotten there earlier. The theater was packed.
History of the Reel Rock Film Tour
The first Reel Rock film tour premiered in 2006 in Boulder, Colorado, featuring two new climbing movies. Founded by Josh Lowell and Peter Mortimer, both who have been producing and directing adventure films for more than a decade, the Reel Rock film tour is organized annually and promotes films about rock and ice climbing, mountaineering, BASE jumping and other adventurous mountain sports. The tours often include gear raffles, athlete appearances and signings and fundraising for non-profit organizations. The tour is put on by Sender Films and Big Up Productions, who team up with North Face and Windstopper as primary sponsors.
Reel Rock Film Tour 2011
This year, the 6th annual film tour kicked off with two winners from a filmmaking competition. The judges picked one winner, and online votes (or “the people”) chose the other winner.
The judges choice, “Crash Pad Test Facility,” featured a comical sequence of tough situations, all of which were handled miraculously by the bouldering crash pad. The people’s choice, “The Climber Kid,” was a climbing parody of The Karate Kid.
There were six other films:
Ice Evolution
A beautiful film shot at British Columbia’s Helmcken Falls, maniac ice climber Will Gadd, a 30+ year veteran to the sport, shows us his dream climb–a heinously difficult but perfectly aesthetic overhanging climb behind a waterfall. Gadd and Tim Emmett dodge 30 foot icicly bombs and climb undoubtedly the hardest pure ice climb in the world. My favorite part of the film? When Gadd and Emmett used a metal detector to hunt down ice-covered bolts from the previous season. It was hilarious.Cold
“What the fuck am I doing here? We have to get down.” Over the past 26 years, 16 expeditions have tried and failed to climb Gasherbrum II, one of Pakistan’s highest peaks (over 8,000 meters), in the winter. In February 2011, Simone Moro, Denis Urubko, and Corey Richards became the first to achieve this goal, surviving -50 degree temperatures and a massive avalanche. In this first-person look at modern super-alpinism, Richards captured both the glory and pain of the trip.Project Dawn Wall
Tommy Caldwell, one of the world’s best rock climbers, has devoted the last decade of his life to opening free climbing routes on Yosemite’s El Capitan. Three seasons into his ultimate project–the seemingly impossible Dawn Wall–Tommy documents his first big ground-up push, showing us pitch after pitch of 5.14 first ascents. Eventually, an epic storm shuts the team down for the season, but boy did they come back with some nutty footage–imagine what it looks like to sleep on a completely vertical face. Ever heard of a portaledge?Origins: Obe & Ashima
One of the more inspiring adventure films I’ve seen, Obe & Ashima profiles nine-year old Ashima Shiraishi, a New York City bouldering prodigy under the tutelage of her passionate coach, Obe Carrion, a former professional. In part of the film, they head to Hueco Tanks, TX, seeking out the highest concentration of boulder problems in the U.S., where Ashima tears it apart. After climbing the notoriously difficult V12 Martini Right, Obe says to Ashima, “This is how psyched feels.”Race for the Nose
It’s the wildest competition known to man, the speed record on the Nose route of Yosemite’s El Capitan. For 50+ years, the world’s best climbers have been one-upping each other, racing up 3,000 feet of vertical granite rock in under 3 hours, risking life and limb to shave mere seconds from the climb. In this film, we follow Dean Potter and Sean Leary, who duke it out with other teams for rock climbing’s ultimate prize.Sketchy Andy / Slacklife
Andy Lewis is a nutty guy who, among other hobbies, enjoys BASE jumping, naked slacklining and aerial “trick-lining.” This film showcases someone who is pushing the limits–some might think too far–with some pretty gnarly feats. Below are some highlights, not from the film tour, of Andy’s best.