Yesterday was a beautiful day to climb, unfortunately, I spent about 6 hours mowing up leaves & doing other backbreaking yard work instead. Thank goodness it finally got too dark to work any more. So, today I just had to climb. Weather was perfect. Cloudy, but warm. Almost 70 degrees for an afternoon high. Weird weather for February, even in Atlanta. I've been wanting to trim some dead branches out of one of the two big pines in my back yard. I've been avoiding climbing this tree because it has an extremely dense thicket of azalea bushes all around it's base and I didn't want to trample them. The plan was to ascend Big Brother Pine, then throw a 25 foot traverse to the second pine at about 45 or 50 feet up. I keep a tag line in Big Brother at about 55' so I used that to set a delta cinch SRT line. Ascended yoyo to a good crotch at about 45' and proceeded to throw a line to the second pine. It took a good 9 or 10 throws to get a branch that I felt confident in. Attached a grapnel to do a J-Bird dangle and played the throw line out until it was at the other trunk. It took several trys, but I finally snagged the throw line & pulled it back to me...ALMOST. The grapnel & bag were still about 4 or 5 feet out of reach. Amazingly, with a lot of wiggling and flipping, I was able to free the throw line from the grapnel and let the bag fall back while I moved the grapnel further out on my throw line. Unfortunately, this was all for nothing, because the throw bag had managed to flip around a dead branch on the target tree and tied itself up pretty good. No amount of pulling or plucking was going to move the bag or line either up or down. Suddenly I'm in bag rescue mode. I chunked the throw bag to the ground and descended. Once on the ground, it took another half dozen throws to isolate a decent setting in the second pine . Pulled up a Poison Ivy rope with delta cinch and threaded my way into the azaleas patch (Just what I was trying to avoid.) to clip in and ascend yoyo. Trimmed about a dozen dead branches on the way up, each time securing in with a back up lanyard and being careful to keep the saw well away from my ropes. Finally got to the stuck throw bag and untangled it from the branch it was stuck on. I sawed this branch off too. This one was messing with me and I take that personal. Trimmed a few more dead stobs on the way up to my TIP. Switched to DRT and double ended my way up another 20 feet or so trimming dead wood along the way. Even though there was another 15 or more feet of climbable tree left, I felt pretty good about what I had accomplished and started down. Descended DRT back down to level with my SRT setting and repositioned the SRT rope to the opposite side of the tree before clipping back in. This allowed me to trim a few more dead branches on the way down that I could not reach on the way up. Landed in the azalea jungle (no where else to go). Took a while to slither out so I could stow my gear, come back, pull ropes from both tree and clean up the trimmed branches. All in all, about 2 1/2 hours tree time. So, how did you spend your Super Bowl Sunday?
Wiley Coyote

Nice climb Wiley, stuck throwbags are great motivators!
-AJ

something like this...



-AJ