My buddy Mich Kemeter was in town for about 3 months and he was really psyched to help me rig and walk a 1,000 foot line here in Sacramento. Together we rigged a few lines longer than 800 feet in preparation for this big line. We had a unique rigging style where we connected 2 pieces of webbing in the middle back to back WebLock's, which made the line have a very unique feeling. The point of connection acted like a node in the movement in the line, which made it so the movements on one side of the connection were in one direction, and the movements on the other side of the connection were in the opposite direction.

The line took us about 2 hours to rig, with tensioning being the bulk of that time. It's extremely hard to tension a 1,000 ft. line with only 2 people. We were using every single pulley that I own to tighten that line. Our mechanical advantage at the end was something like 135:1. We got the tension all the way up to 2.4 tonnes, which is around 5,300 lbf. I was quite scared at this point because this is a LOT of power to have under your feet for the entire time it takes to walk 1,000 ft. on a slackline. I really didn't want the line to break while anyone was on it. I've seen a lot of longlines break in my day and this one was MUCH bigger and tighter than all of those lines.

The webbing we used was Spider Silk attached to Mantra via two back-to-back WebLock's. We got it so that there was about 10 feet of sag in the middle with a 160 lb person on it. I was able to onsight fullman the line and it took about 35 minutes each direction. I was completely exhausted by the end of the walk, these lines require nothing more than endurance.

One of the down sides to this day was the fact that Mich's backpack got stolen while he was taking pictures of me walking. In his backpack he had over $4,000 worth of gear, his passport, and his credit cards, which was a total bummer. He didn't even get to try the line this day because of this horrible incident. We both took off running after the person that stole the bag, but they got away with all that stuff.

We decided to rig the line a second time so that Mich could at least give the line a try and I could get the fullman. In the end, he was only able to get to the half way point several times. This line had such strange movements, we will try again with a single piece of webbing when he returns to the US.

Now I am in the process of finding a spot for the 500m line in April. This will be a giant milestone in the slackline world that will definitely go down in the record books!

Line-Specs