Roddy McG
Treehouser
Dear Mister "MasterBlaster", Thank you for the welcome to the TreeHouse. It seems like a gathering of like minds. As for "How in the world does an American mountain guide and climbing arborist wind up in Japan?" The answer is as follows: I am actually a "Canadian" mountain guide {see http://www.acmg.ca/ which is the web site for out "Association of Canadian Mountain Guides (A.C.M.G.) "... I think that some of my contemporaries in the A.C.M.G. were responsible for mentoring the American Mountain Guide Association (A.M.G.A.) into the International Federation of Mountain Guides Associations (IFMGA)}. I was guiding helicopter skiing in British Columbia, Canada (Canadian Mountain Holidays was the heli-ski company I was working for). Early in the winter of 1991-92 a group of Japanese ladies came to the lodge. Long story short is that I married one of them in 1999. We live in Japan. For the past eight years we have been living in a house in central Nagano at 1,500 metres above sea level (1,500 m a.s.l.) and had a wood stove installed as the main heating unit. The hunt for firewood ensued thereafter. We basically live in a tree farm of Larix kaempferi with several of these on the house property. I thought it would be a "good idea" to acquire some climbing spurs and flip-line to climb some of these trees so as to remove limbs and get a bit more sunlight on the ground. Just by chance at a social event I met a relatively local guy (Buckaroo Chainsaw, a.k.a. Toshiaki Mizuno) who is working as a climbing arborist. He has been a technical rock, snow and ice climber, and alpinist from a young age, a logger since deciding the work as a basically office bound engineer was not for him and a self-taught climbing arborist. He speaks pretty good English and soon he asked me to work as his ground assistant on the rare occasion he needs someone on the ground to help him (I introduced him to the term "swamper"). He also came up to the Duck Ranch (2012-06) and gave me a bit of lesson and demonstration of spur climbing and the use of a chain saw up the tree. From there things have just "growe'd like Topsy". I tend to be working "alone" a lot and what with all the newness floating around, and my mountain guide trained situational awareness, etc. I tend to do things rather slow, over cautiously, and very, very carefully. Vision statement here at Teeny Tiny Logging Co.: "My work is poor, but at least it's slow." I hope that that answers your question. I am going back to the Great White North (Canada) for a month... basically to just outside Banff National Park(Canmore, Alberta, Canada... to attend a mandatory (for my mountain guide certification) first-aid refresher course and to assist a fellow ACMG'er hunting the deer on the east slopes of the Blue Canadian Rockies. I will be away just over a month but when I get back home here I will be back on the computer to continue reading these forums with an aim to get my self more edumakated about this whole trees, ropes, saws, etc. world. Kneedle Knoddle Knew (ask an old Brit, use the phrase "Goon Show"), Roddy McGowan
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