Climbing Trees

We needed to have some limbs pruned in one of our trees in the back, so I managed to find an excuse to pull out my harness and ropes and go climbing.

It wasn't totally just an excuse, since our neighbor was helping me, and his tallest ladder didn't reach as far as we needed to go. It did get me to the point where I could grab onto the lowest branch and start climbing, though.

So there I was, perched in the crook of a branch about fifty feet up (tied off, of course, to a rope I'd tossed around a higher branch), working away with a handsaw on one of the branches we needed to prune. I'm not much for power saws, but let me tell you that when you're crouched awkwardly on a branch that high, you really do want something faster than a hand saw. I had to lay back on my branch and rest a few times before I made it all the way through the branch.

One of the other branches was pretty big, so I tossed a rope higher and tied it off, anchoring it in a couple of different directions to keep it from swinging. Then our neighbor went up the ladder (this branch was lower) and used a chainsaw to take it off. It dropped a couple of feet as the ropes took up the slack, and then hung in the air.

It's very cool when something like that works out the way you'd planned it!