Do you start with older style climbing? Do you jump right into high tech? Do you mix and match? and how did you learn.What do you feel is the most important part of training? Etc.
Thanks
Greg
I'm going to try to actually answer Greg's question rather than meander off on a tangent like I did in my other post
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Much of what I have to say will be colored by the fact that in my work, "arborist" activities are uncommon. Only a small minority of FS climbers do hazard reductions or removals, rigging, or chainsaw work aloft. Pruning to take out deadwood, or for aesthetic reasons?...almost unheard of.
Not because we don't have the skills, but rather because the bulk of our work is in a different arena. The phrase "natural resource management climbing" has been coined for the general scope of it. We need to access tree boles and canopies to harvest cones and grafting scion, to survey for species of interest, to perform a wide variety of wildlife habitat enhancement activities, to do a ever-expanding range of basic research to explore how the forest canopy environment and the plants and animals that live there works, and even installation of solar panels and comm system antennas in support of research activities or firefighting.
So our instruction and certification for beginning climbers does not include much of what y'all consider the bread and butter of tree climbing work.
I've been certified as a Forest Service climbing instructor since 1990, and been training instructors only a few years less. Well before I got started as a climber, USFS Region 6 (Oregon and Washington) was ground zero for establishment of a formal training and certification/recertification program for tree climbers. R5 (California) was not all that far behind. Since 2000, the R6 protocol has been taken Service-wide.
As you might imagine, in the early days FS climbing was based on practices common in the logging industry...you can call that not just old school, but maybe even pre-historic.
We got better. We continue to get better. Some of us are right up there with cutting edge technology in treeclimbing. A few, like me, have been in the biz long enough, kept climbing and with enough curiosity to keep abreast, yet still have all the old school background that younger climbers and instructors today may lack. I've been lucky...by chance and by chasing it, I've been involved in as wide a spectrum of treeclimbing work as any FS climber I've run across.
Today, my coursework as an instructor runs 5 full days for a class of 4, to teach the full scope that I am certified to offer. In that time I can produce climbers who are generally competent to safely perform "natural resource management climbing"...not usually at a high degree of efficiency, for that takes far more in-tree time to develop, but climbers I am comfortable certifying for the work.
I think my basic answer to Greg's question is, I mix old school and new together, generally in a progression for each module I cover; i.e. for lanyards/fliplines, I demo a Becket hitch, then a mechanical cam adjuster, then a friction hitch w/ slack-tender. The students have to show me competence in setting up and using all three systems. In general, they pretty quickly decide their personal favorite and use that thereafter for the course of the workshop.
For friction hitch climbing, aka DbRT, I demo what I consider a basic system, Blake's hitch tied in the tail of the climb line, using a biner for the harness attachment. The students learn that, then I move directly to a split tail. That is an easy transition, generally. Then I introduce slack tender setups, a couple of varieties. Then advanced hitches, maybe two or three at most, but settling on one for the students to learn (I vary that depending on what I'm interested in at the time
). Then I add footlocking the tail, and finally the Pantin. Again, the students pretty quickly pick up one system that they prefer and work with that for the rest of the workshop.
In both the above examples, I don't insist on any one particular system, but I will push students to experiment if I feel they are narrowing in too quickly.
Enough!! And you thought you were rambling on too much, Greg...no way, I am the master!
I really do think that being on spikes is becoming a lost art with all the emphasis of not using spurs save for TD. Both should surely be mastered by the climber and melded together. Just my .02
