Welcome to Strider Trees.
Today, I'm talking about accessing the tree,
using a moving rope system or a double rope system ddrt, drt the MRs.
All of those little acronyms mean the same thing.
It's a little excerpt from a climbing 101 course
that's going to be available on my website that should teach you all the basics
to get up into a tree for the first time, so hopefully you'll find it valuable.
Check it out.
So now the rope is set and we're going to try and get into the tree,
so the next thing we need to do is attach our climb system to our climb rope.
Now I've already done up
what's going to be my climb lanyard here, and I want to point out
a couple of things.
So this rope has a spliced eye on the end
and so I can attach a caribiner really easily to this no knots required.
However, my lanyard here, which is essentially just
a redundant system, it's the same system that I'm going to be climbing on,
but it's it's shorter.
I've got a little short of extra rope
and this is so that I can have to tie in points
when I want to switch between them to move within the canopy.
This system I've got is two locking carabiners.
These are triple locking,
so you don't want to just use regular open close carabiners.
They can pop open too easily.
They're not safe,
and you really don't want to use the climbing carabiners, either.
Like this one here?
So a lot of rock climbers have these they're called
screw gate carabiners, where they lock off with a screw.
Those aren't particularly safe either, because as often as you're
going to be open and closing these, it's easy to forget to screw the gate locked.
And if you do, that's a that's a dangerous thing
because an unlocked screw gate caribiner is just as risky as any other
inexpensive lock non locking caribiner So I don't recommend these at all.
They're not particularly safe.
I like these spring loaded locking carabiners.
They don't open.
They lock automatically super easily.
Now this rope, like I said, doesn't have a splice on it.
So what I tried is called a fisherman's termination.
Not I think other people have called it a scaffold. Not.
And we show you how to tie that real quick here.
It's easy.
It's a good termination.
Not for climbing on.
Take your own
goes through the carabiner.
Wraps around itself,
and then as it comes back around instead of wrapping down, you wrap up.
Up over the top of itself, so that crosses over.
And then after it comes around that second time,
you're going to pass it down through the middle of your two
raps past the tail down through the middle of the two wraps.
And you make sure you leave yourself a little bit of tail.
So we should see as two parallel strands going all the way around the knot
and then a little cross here at the one on the one side,
that knot will cinch down as you put weight on it around your carabiner,
and it will tend to lock the carabiner in orientation, which is good.
A little safer will easier to work with like that.
So if you don't have an eye, this is a good alternative.
As far as setting up your climb system,
you want to have your eye on one side
and you want to have your friction hatch on the other.
So like I demonstrated before at the tree.
This is really all you need for a friction set up.
But I'm going to integrate a pulley.
It's called a hitch climber or a hitch tending pulley
to make it a little bit easier for me to use.
Once again, it's not totally necessary, but it certainly makes life a lot easier.
You put your pulley down below.
I like to put one end of the
prusik cord on there just for the sake of keeping track of it.
And the knot I'm going to tie here is a friction hitch called a Michoacan.
There's a lot of different friction hitches.
There's a vow to to trust the distal.
It's important that you learn one or two of them.
I recommend the distil, the Michoacan and those are my two favorites,
but this is what I'm going to tie here.
Go 1234 wraps up and I might actually
end up doing three wraps up because I'm a little bit of a smaller guy.
Make sure it crosses over the bottom here.
Still wrapping her and then I'm going to reverse
the direction of the my last wrap on the bottom.
Go behind the rope.
And bring it up underneath that last one.
And the bottom coil.
And then back around the front.
I might have to add one more wrapping in here
because it didn't come out real even.
Yes, that's still slipping.
I need to add another wrap. Do.
So that one more time here, OK?
one, 23.
Let's go for wraps over four wraps up
crossover.
Around the back
and then up through.
Through
that bottom one.
And back down.
Once again, it's the McCullough carnage.
It works well, it's important to have a couple of different in your back pocket
because different ropes interact very differently.
But you should be able to pull on it and have it lock
and then you should be able to release it by pulling on the top of the knot.
That looks like it's going to work beautifully.
I'll complete that by closing the system there
and then that system I will clip to myself.
Now, the reason I use
this pulley is for that motion, I just demonstrated there.
If I didn't have this pulley here, I have to
manually advance this hitch with my hand.
I have to slide it up.
But if I've got this pulley,
it slides the not up for me as I pull on the slack.
So if I'm sitting here and I go down, I go down and it locks.
And when I want to go off, I pull down here and I slide the tail up
and it keeps all the slack out of the system
just like that.
And that is your primary claim system.
Like I said, I've got some redundancy, I've got a secondary
climb system or a positioning lanyard here
that all served me up in the tree so I can switch between points.
But this is going to be my access.
This is my lanyard.
They function.
Essentially, the same just gives me some redundancy.
Now I will be making my way up the tree, and I want to show you guys
kind of a basic hip thrust method is what we call it
for accessing to the to the tie point.
Sorry to interrupt, but if you enjoy my content in this channel
and you look at it diving deeper into tree work, check out StriderTrees.com.
I've got a course for the beginner who's just looking at getting into
the trees for the first time.
And I've also got a series that's more tilted towards folks
who are already doing residential tree work.
It's going to have the safety trainings and the skill trainings
starting at new hire to take someone right off the street,
make them an apprentice,
teach them the more advanced skills all the way to a foreman.
And if that's something you'd be interested in, you can leave your
email address there on the website and I'll let you guys know first thing
when that's available.
Also, you can schedule to have me come out to your job site
and be a contract climber and an instructor.
And combine that time to offer you the best value
to upgrade your skills with your crew on your job.
So you can do that.
You can schedule that on my website as well as StriderTrees.com.
Now back to the goods.
So when I'm
looking for is my path up the tree, I like to walk up the leaning
side of the tree because it allows me to keep my feet on the backside of it,
and it makes it a lot easier and I can help myself up with my legs.
And I'm not quite using not use my arms quite so much.
So I'm going to pass my ropes up
and over and around these little branches down here at the base
because they're going to be in my way otherwise.
There we go.
Now I can just walk right up the backside of this
while tending my slack.
On my climb system.
So like I said, we call this the hip thrust method, because what you do
is you get your feet up, get your legs up
and then you pull down and hip thrust
pull down hip thrust.
Now I've got quite a bit of slack in the system,
so I got a tend the slack out and now I'm safe from from fall back
and I'm going to repeat the maneuver have thrust,
hip thrust and I'm kind of wandering around the trunk a little bit.
Take the slack out.
And I can use this
to work my way right up the tree
as you get more comfortable.
You'll probably tend
your slack a little bit less frequently
because
it's easy enough to tend it once you pull your arm with a few strokes,
three or four or five strokes, whatever tend
the slack tend to slack.
So at all, at all
points, I'm secure from fall, I might take a swing,
I might fall off the side of this swing out, but I should be safe.
Makes for an
exciting day when you get a good swing.
Going up here
and take the slack out.
All right, now I'm going to my first little obstacle.
I've got to get around this without swinging off.
So this is where my positioning lanyard comes in real handy.
If I throw my positioning lanyard here,
a little bit of slack around this trunk
and connect it back to myself.
Now I can't swing
so I can keep climbing, and that lanyard is going to keep me
from swinging around the tree.
And I worked my way through
some of these branches.
And I'm going to keep going around.
Now, before I get out of you.
Show me, here I go, I'm going to move my roof up this a little bit more.
And keep going up
now that I'm here.
Disconnect my positioning lanyard
and I can stand
right here in this union to extend my slack.
I'm going to toss down a couple
of little dead branches that are going to be in the way,
and I've access the tree
once I'm up in the tree.
And the way I am now is where I started
using the leapfrog trick with my climb systems.
So this climb system's going to terminate right there
and I want to go higher than that.
So what I can do is I put my secondary climb system around a branch
like so
reconnect that to myself.
So now I'm connected redundantly.
I can actually take off this climb system.
Pull it back.
Pass it around a different branch, I could go off this way,
I can work my way out this branch.
If I wanted to,
but more likely, we're just going to go up.
So I'm going to put that right there.
Reconnect.
Take out the slack.
And start moving up the tree.
Take out the slack, so right now I'm at the level of my talent point,
so I need to throw my other lanyard around something
higher.
Let's go around this way.
And now I'm connected with my lanyard,
I can leapfrog, I got my climb line again
and put a little bit of slack,
throw it up and over a branch right there.
Now, I've got that back to me,
I can connect it back up again.
Take up the slack.
And away we go.
Onwards and upwards.
You get the idea.
Now your tree climbing,
beautiful.