It’s a match made in YouTube heaven — extreme sports and a tropical paradise.
The extreme sport in this case is slacklining. For the uninitiated, it appears to be a cross between tightrope walking and trampolining.
The slackline is a 2-inch-wide strip of heavy-duty woven nylon and polyester suspended off the ground between two anchors — in this case, tree trunks. And the tropical paradise is Onomea Falls, a three-tiered waterfall about 120-feet in height on the grounds of Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden, about seven miles north of Hilo.
In May, two world-class competitive slackliners bounced, bounded, flipped and flew on a series of eight lines strung amid some of the most sumptuous scenery on the planet. The two, both Californians, are Alex Mason, at 19 already a world champion and one of the most accomplished athletes in the sport, and “Sketchy Andy” Lewis, at 29, the sport’s first world champion and its godfather.
The video, “Slackladder,” released Thursday, features Mason’s mastery of slackline acrobatics in Onomea’s sultry setting. It’s sponsored by Red Bull energy drink, long a benefactor of extreme sports.
In a preview clip, Mason said they took slacklining “out of it’s natural habitat over grass and pads and put it over water and rocks.”
“It’s slippery. It’s wet. It’s muddy. It’s a jungle, basically,” Lewis added.
Also complicating matters were little fire ants.
“Make it stop itching!” Lewis yelled at one point.
In a phone interview from Germany, where he’s gearing up for Sunday’s Globetrotters World Slackline Masters Event, Mason said it took two trips to Hawaii to make “Slackladder” happen.
“We had a scouting trip and then the filming trip,” he explained. “On the scouting trip, we brought the lines and saw if this was plausible, if it was totally going to work. And then on the filming trip, we brought a 20-person crew and a bunch of cameras and got it done.”
Riggers, led by Lewis, who acted as the project’s safety coordinator, built a “slackline ladder,” using about a mile of ropes and cables to create a 1,000-foot course of slacklines, much of it uphill, through the garden.
Mason said there were plans to scout other Hawaii venues, “but we went to this location first, and we called the other ones off.”
“The place that we chose was perfect for the project we wanted to do. All the waterfalls were awesome,” Mason said, adding he’d like to return “as soon as we can.”
This isn’t the first time Red Bull has brought an extreme sport to the Onomea area. The Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series made its final stop of the 2010 season at nearby Kawainui Falls. Hundreds watched as divers plummeted from an 85-foot platform adjacent to the falls. This time, however, the event was hush-hush and access tightly restricted.
“I wasn’t allowed to talk about it while it was going on,” said David Tan, executive director of the botanical garden.
Tan’s impression of the slackliners and their project?
“These people are crazy,” he said and laughed. “They were doing it over the waterfall pools, and while it appears shallow — and I always thought they were until this event — they’re about eight- or nine-feet deep, they told me. When I saw people jump in there, I thought, ‘Oh, no, they’re going to break their knees.’ But no, it’s deep enough.
“It was really neat, and I did get to see the raw footage. It was really awesome, so I’m looking forward to seeing the finished product.”
Tan said the garden receives numerous film and photography requests, “but for extreme sports, this is a first, as far as I know.”
Slacklining is a considered fringe sport, even by extreme sports standards, but Mason thinks there’s potential for slacklining be a part of the X Games, the Olympics of extreme sports.
“Competitive slacklining has grown massively in the past couple of years,” he said. “It’s just getting cooler and cooler and bigger and bigger. I have no idea where it’s going, but I do know it’s getting more popular, and we are getting more in the public view.”
To view the video ,“Slackladder,” online, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXLAHw35Svg. Or type “Slackladder” in YouTube’s search engine.
Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com.