TimBr
Official Well Known Greeter
- Location
- Northern Virginia
Where would you put it if you pull it up? It's a bit hard to carry around. Besides, you don't want anything catching it on the way down, either.
The best place for a long unused section of your rope is tucked into a rope bag, I think.
I'm just trying to go to having one SRT ascent line and using the other end of the same rope for DdRT (just so I can use both my uni and ZZ) like Yoyoman does. That means I need all my climbing rope out of the bag and lying on the ground next to the trunk. That's the second safest place for it, I reckon. Of course redirects can mean the rope is out anywhere in the canopy at times. One way to minimize the loose rope there is to have different size ropes for different trees so we're not using 200 foot ropes for apple trees. Just my thoughts...
I really like the idea of pulling the tail up and using it as another tie-in. That eliminates the possibility of it getting dragged to the chipper, and provides for better work positioning. It does hinder ground lowering of the climber in an emergency, but I'm beginning to think the ground guys are much more likely to nearly kill you than they are to save you. If you use the tail DdRT, they could even sever your base tie and possibly not be able to kill you.
This might be too much like work, and a pain to have to keep moving, but a climber could have one of those fairly strong plastic extension cord reels with about a 3/8" rope spooled up on it, and hang it from a nearby branch, for use in pulling up saws and water bottles, etc. The fact that it's a round reel with a crank handle might make it much faster to pull stuff up.
I saw a story once on TV about an Australian beach, I think it was, where a lifeguard had an idea that it would be helpful to have giant reels of rope stationed at the top of the beach, with a lifeguard's little floatation tool attached to each rope.
Almost as soon as they got all the systems deployed, a huge storm hit that caused a need for many, many rescues within a short space of time. The newly set up rope reels saved the day, because under the old way of doing things, the rescue swimmers would have had to swim out to a victim, grab hold of them, and pull them back into the beach. Which would have taken a long time, and thoroughly exhausted the rescue swimmers. What happened instead was that each rescue swimmer grabbed a floatation device attached to a rope and ran with it into the surf. They'd reach a victim, grab hold, and then two guys on opposite sides of each reel at the top of the beach would turn their guts out, hauling both the swimmer and victim into shore. This saved huge amounts of time, and the energy conserved on the part of the rescue swimmers allowed them to repeatedly go back out for more victims. Many, many people were saved.
Sorry for the derail, just trying to point out how helpful a hand crank reel might be.
Also, if the rope you use to pull stuff up with is only attached to a small branch nearby, and the rope gets sucked into the chipper, it will likely tear loose and leave, but at least it won't be the climber getting yanked out of the tree.
Tim
