A Spiritual Quest on a Rope--at 1,200 Feet

Some 1,200 feet above Yosemite Valley, Dean Potter took a deep breath and stepped with his bare feet upon a nylon rope strung 70 feet across a precipice.

It undulated beneath him.

Exhaling slowly, he started to edge forward. The rope oscillated like a gigantic rubber band. Potter tried to focus on his orange Peach Schnapps T-shirt tied in a knot at the other end of the rope.

But something was wrong. Potter was afraid. He fought to quell his fear and his pounding heart, only to slip into a fierce internal debate.

Concentrate.

Look down. Oh my god!

Don’t even glance. Breathe. Relax.

Look down. Holy smoke! You’re going to smash your head like a pumpkin on that rock ledge. You’re a goner!

Potter hesitated. His eyes flickered, scanning the ledge beneath him. He struggled to keep his balance. And failed.

What an idiot, I can’t believe you looked, he told himself as he fell, just missing the rock.

Potter, a 26-year-old “slack liner,” was tethered to the rope by a leash attached to a harness that was wrapped around his waist and legs.

He felt the sharp jolt as he tumbled seven feet and bounced back up like a yo-yo. It was a wrenching yank that hurt most in the groin where the harness circled his legs.

Slack lining, or loose rope walking, is part sport, part mind game, part spiritual quest. It requires physical agility, precision and balance to walk atop a line stretched over a precipice--the kind of fine tuning that allows a walker to avoid plunging simply by bending one pinkie finger. Even though an occasional slacker has been known to cross a precipice with no tether, there have been no reported deaths.

Unlike a tightrope, a slack rope will sway up and down and side to side. It can ripple or swing in a giant circle, like a jump rope. The rope is not actually slack but because it’s nylon, it’s springy. The longer the rope, the greater the bounce. And the bounce is largest when the walker reaches the middle. Tightrope walkers such as the Frenchman Philippe Petit, who has walked a wire across New York’s World Trade Center, carry a pole to help balance; slackers use only their arms in a tai-chi-like movement, with bent knees and a fluid yet slow motion.

The challenge, slackers say, is the mental concentration, staying relaxed and focused as you methodically pad across a gulf, wrestling with panic. It is not the short burst of anxiety a bungee jumper or skydiver faces before leaping, but a deliberate dialogue with fear. The best slackers are able to suppress their emotion and “Zen out.”

“You are really fully alert to everything--you are super alive,” said Potter. “You conquer your fear, you walk again and again, and the fear is gone. That’s a great feeling. You get addicted to the feeling.”

Potter is a lean 6-foot-5, 200-pound man with large feet (size 12, although he disdains shoes) and huge hands. A college dropout, he lives year-round in a tent in Yosemite, where he is a member of the park’s search and rescue team and earns $100 working two days a week washing windows. He has no running water or phone. His father is a former Army colonel who retired after 27 years and his mother is a nurse.

Potter is widely regarded as one of Yosemite’s finest young rock climbers. He was the first person to climb with no ropes three-quarters of the way up the northwest face of the 8,836-foot Half Dome. The endeavor, accomplished this fall, took 4 hours and 17 minutes. (With traditionally laborious climbing techniques and ropes, the previous record was 20 hours and 56 minutes, according to climbing lore.)

Should he slip during a free solo climb, Potter knows it’s likely he would plummet to his death. He never considers the possibility when he’s scaling a rock wall. But before he walks a slack line stretched high above the valley floor, even though he is tethered to a rope, Potter collides with the full force of his fears. The illusion of danger looms far more ominously. He is terrified by the vast expanse of space between the line and the ground below.

This is the single most petrifying experience of his life--and he does it again and again, looking for greater and greater heights to span.

Ultimate Challenge: Lost Arrow Spire

After each triumphant walk, Potter feels a certain peace. His stride on the ground becomes more certain, and in the middle of a forbidding rock climb, his reach seems more spiderlike and daring.

In Utah, he walked his longest span: 90 feet. In Yosemite last summer, after he recovered from his tumble, he walked his highest: 1,200 feet.

Yet one walk had beckoned Potter--a slack-lining feat accomplished only by a few elite. This fall, he hoped to walk between the valley rim and Lost Arrow Spire, 2,900 feet above the valley floor.

Slack lining the Lost Arrow Spire is the stuff of legends, a walk on an incline that Scott Balcom, the father of slack lining, did more than a decade ago. It is a challenge that causes slackers to get dewy-eyed with awe after a few beers, resorting to adjectives like “totally rad” or “bitchin.’ ”

Among the big leaf maples and black oaks on the valley floor, slackers point up to a thick needle of gray rock, protruding toward the sky. The yawning gap between the steely spire and the rim is widely considered one of Yosemite’s most intimidating--one that some face only after quaffing a few tequila shots. It is a precipice that has dispatched many slackers back down the trail, humbled by jelly-like muscles and a sudden lack of nerve.

Who the devil invented this, anyway?

*

For decades, rock climbers eager to improve their technique have practiced walking across just about anything they could get their feet on. They’d try chains; they’d try cables.

In 1983, two climbers from Oregon experimented with walking across short nylon rope lines strung among the trees in Yosemite. Once confident of their abilities, they rigged a steel cable between the Lost Arrow Spire and the rim. But they were unable to walk it.

Their mistake, thought Scott Balcom, a 20-year-old climber from South Pasadena, was obvious. Why not just walk across on the same nylon rope they used to practice?

“I had the idea that I was supposed to do it,” Balcom said.

He recruited another climbing buddy, Charles Tucker, from Van Nuys. Tucker, who goes by the name Chongo, thought slack lining was a crazy idea, a product of perhaps too much late-night reverie. But Balcom rigged up a rope not far from the ground and Chongo obligingly hopped on. He promptly fell off. He tried it again and tumbled, glaring at Balcom.

Back home, Balcom tied a slack line in his yard. He practiced constantly. In his mind, he would visualize the Lost Arrow Spire. He would take his ropes and set them up under the arches of the Ventura Freeway by the Arroyo Seco and walk 25-foot stretches, 150 feet in the air.

Balcom returned to Yosemite a year later to attempt the Lost Arrow Spire. But he fell repeatedly. His technique was flawed, he thought. Balance, it seemed to him, required a visual aid, a focal point. He tried looking at a rock by his destination. It was too far. This time he fell and didn’t have time to catch the line with his hand; he was at the mercy of his harness and leash. For a split second, Balcom believed he would die.

Balcom spent another year refining his technique. When he reached Yosemite, he met and fell in love with a college girl working at the park. On July 13, 1985, Balcom walked the slack line to the Lost Arrow Spire. His father and Balcom’s girlfriend, who later became his wife, watched.

‘I Was Scared Out of My Mind by It’

This success spurred on Chongo and another South Pasadena climber, Darrin Carter. They too became obsessed with doing the Lost Arrow Spire.

“I was scared out of my mind by it,” said Chongo, now 47. “I had no idea what it was like to be that scared.”

Chongo’s fear depressed him. He worried that he would always feel haunted by this failure. Then he set himself to perfecting his skills. He started looking at the rope like it was a swaying needle and tried to keep it pointing plumb. He worked on mounting more smoothly, putting his right foot atop the rope, grabbing the line with his left hand, pulling his body up in a crouch. As soon as he brought his left foot onto the line, his arms would shoot out for balance. Then he’d take two steps, trying to keep his body relaxed. It felt like surfing, only more difficult.

He welcomed the sense of edge slack lining gave him as he aged. “It keeps me in the rad boys club--there’s not a lot of old guys who do rad stuff.”

When Balcom returned to Yosemite on July 13, 1995--the 10-year anniversary of his Lost Arrow Spire walk--Chongo and Carter joined him. Balcom intended to walk Lost Arrow again. Chongo and Carter had already done it.

Chongo mounted the rope, his Walkman pounded out a tune by the Indigo Girls, “Secure Yourself to Heaven.” And Chongo walked the line.

Balcom was last to cross. The valley spread beneath him as though he were on some tiny island in the sky, trees blurred into a vast green carpet parted by occasional black ribbons of roads. Buses looked like ants, the lodge and maintenance facility seemed no larger than his fingernail. Water from Yosemite Falls crashed loudly against the rocks, or maybe the pounding was his heart.

Balcom was plagued with doubt. Unlike his friends, he had responsibilities: a wife, a child, a job as a carpenter, a house in Arizona. He worried about his then-5-year-old son, Adom. If something happened, Adom would never know him. This, he vowed, would be the last time he walked Lost Arrow. At least until his son was older.

As Balcom began crossing, Chongo tapped a rock, calling out, “You can do it.” And Balcom did. He had survived Lost Arrow once again. It struck him that slack lining was symbolic of life: The rope was straight and unmoving until you got on, then it swung--forcing you to ride the curves as you traveled to your destination.

*

Thirteen years after Balcom’s first Lost Arrow walk, Potter yearned to try it. He had heard tales about how Balcom had tried and tried until he finally crossed. He would hear how Balcom returned on the 10-year anniversary of his walk and had done it again. Now it was Potter’s quest.

Potter’s mother, silver-haired Patricia Dellert, part Skaticook Indian, likes to tell a story about when her son was 5 years old and the family lived in an Arab village in occupied Jordan, where Dean’s father was stationed with the U.S. Army. A tall stone wall surrounded their home. One day, Dean fell on his head after trying to climb the wall. Muslim women chanted and threw salt in hopes of purging evil spirits and making the boy well.

“Whatever they did, it worked--though I don’t know, maybe it’s why he is the way he is,” said Dellert. She is clearly proud of her youngest child’s accomplishments. A practitioner of yoga, she tries to view his slack lining as another means of reaching a meditative state--a more comforting way to consider the notion of her boy walking a rope across a precipice.

Dean Potter began slack lining six years ago in Joshua Tree. He rock climbed so much that his fingers were raw and painful. A friend told him about rope walking and introduced him to a laid-back blue-eyed hippie 21 years his senior: Chongo.

The two quickly became friends. Potter was able to stand on the slack rope on his first try. Soon he could walk low lines, 8 to 10 feet off the ground, with no tether. He could turn, walk with his hands behind his back, walk backward, or make the line bounce.

He would slack line when he felt troubled, and his problems melted, leaving him feeling centered. Or he would walk as a friend played his guitar. Sometimes he would be joined by a number of buddies mulling over the vagaries of life, and slack lining would give way to partying.

A Humbling Encounter

Once the ropes were placed higher, Potter’s heart beat faster. His balance was more precarious.

“You are walking on exactly the same thing but it changes, it makes you scared,” he said. “My goal is to walk the same high as I do low to the ground--to be able to control my emotions. I want to feel comfortable enough to walk unprotected”--without a tether.

By this fall, Potter’s reputation as a rock climber had grown, and he had become the poster boy for slack lining, a pastime that draws mostly from the ranks of climbers. While numerous rock climbers try slack lining on lower levels, only perhaps a dozen or so proceed to higher levels.

Potter’s climbing colleagues couldn’t help but wonder: Was it loose rope walking that honed his climbing, affording him uncanny balance?

Throngs of climbers queued up for a chance to try low-level beginner slack lines, strung between trees. In the macho world of climbing, where sure-footedness rules, a close encounter with a wiggling slack line was humbling.

“The line is trying to get rid of you, to bounce you off,” said one 40-year-old climber from Los Angeles, whose shoulder still ached from his first encounter with a slack line 60 days before. “You try to stand and it goes up and down really fast, then it gets steady and swings sideways.”

As autumn cast its first chill upon the valley, Potter readied himself for his quest, Lost Arrow Spire. For a man who lived in a tent, October was cluttered with unusually heavy obligations. His mother was visiting (her first trip to Yosemite), a bevy of potential sponsors had expressed an interest in him for their climbing wear, and there was talk of a slack lining video.

Potter needed to stay focused. He planned to cross Lost Arrow after his mother left. A photographer known for his work among climbers was flying in from Austria to spend 10 days shooting Potter rock climbing and slack lining.

One morning, Potter and Chongo strung up a yellow line eight feet above the ground in a grove of tall pines and oaks. It was about 60 feet long, like the Lost Arrow walk.

Potter had just learned that he had been laid off from his window washing job. Stressed, he was chain-eating Altoids. His face, adorned with a King Tut goatee, looked gaunt, his cheekbones slightly reddened by endless days in the sun. He stripped down from his new blue jeans to his green shorts. He pulled off his black and white checked Patagonia shirt.

He and Chongo tinkered with the rope, tuning it taunt like a violin string. In a blink, Potter leaped barefoot atop the rope and breathed deeply. As he stepped forward, the line wiggled and wobbled. Potter pinned his eyes to the tree ahead of him. Then he lost his balance and jumped off.

“I haven’t relaxed yet,” he said with a sigh.

Chongo climbed on, his purple and white sneakers slapping the rope. “Whoa,” he called out as it dipped.

Chongo and Potter alternated walking atop the practice rope. With each turn, Potter’s face increasingly lost tension.

“Maybe the first couple of seconds, you are thinking in words, then quickly you need to snap out and just think of balancing and breathing,” he said. “You quiet your mind.”

After an hour, they were tired. Chongo didn’t exercise much any more. He sat in the Yosemite Lodge cafeteria for days polishing a book he had written on climbing. Potter had hiked 19 miles up Half Dome the previous day, and climbed El Capitan, setting another time record, the day before that.

Chongo wondered if he could repeat his previous success at Lost Arrow. Potter, yet to succeed, was unconcerned. He had been able to unwind, exorcise the stress he had felt about losing his job. He had stopped fretting about whether his mother’s visit was going well. For that one hour of slack lining, he had been totally in the moment.

Did he feel ready?

“Who knows,” he said. “I have a lot to think about before I go on that particular line.”

Two days later, he walked the slack line across Lost Arrow Spire.

Twice.