Still at it at 77

[Mapleman]

not sure how many of the old crew is around here...i posted a lot back in 2009, then came back briefly in 2012 after working superstorm sandy...i didn't get into doing big trees til my early 30s...this was a blessing as i learned to use my head as well as my body, incorporating kinesiology, physics and geometry into my work...so instead of trying to muscle everything, i let gravity work for me...

also i either worked for myself or contracted my climbing skills out, particularly in the sf bay area and during hurricane and ice storm cleanups from new england to florida...one thing i knew early on was if i wanted to climb into my 70s, i needed to take care of my body, and never work more than eight months a year...it worked, i'm happy to say, and in those four months off every year, i traveled a lot, sometimes taking my climbing gear with me...i've worked in australia, new zealand, hawaii, canada, alaska, etc...

now i only climb for my friends and do some side jobs...i like to say all my exes have the best looking trees in their neighborhoods, and i can still do a good sized tree...took down a large pine leader that split off from two others thirty feet up...only eighty feet or so to the top, but when i hit the ground and unstrapped my sliding D, it felt good and rekindled a lot of memories, so here i am, back at arborsite.com...

i've been reading some of the past posts from when i wrote "Guido's Last Hurrah," a semi-fictional series of vignettes of working in the bay area back in the 80s...man, the business sure has changed since then, but not the work...i'm thinking i've got a few good stories to share here, but not sure how it might be received...last time around a few folks thought it was inappropriate to write tree stories on a professional arborist site, even if those stories were instructional...and then there were the PC crowd upset cuz i wrote things they considered "out of bounds"...

 

[Tetanus]

not sure how many of the old crew is around here...i posted a lot back in 2009, then came back briefly in 2012 after working superstorm sandy...i didn't get into doing big trees til my early 30s...this was a blessing as i learned to use my head as well as my body, incorporating kinesiology, physics and geometry into my work...so instead of trying to muscle everything, i let gravity work for me...

also i either worked for myself or contracted my climbing skills out, particularly in the sf bay area and during hurricane and ice storm cleanups from new england to florida...one thing i knew early on was if i wanted to climb into my 70s, i needed to take care of my body, and never work more than eight months a year...it worked, i'm happy to say, and in those four months off every year, i traveled a lot, sometimes taking my climbing gear with me...i've worked in australia, new zealand, hawaii, canada, alaska, etc...

now i only climb for my friends and do some side jobs...i like to say all my exes have the best looking trees in their neighborhoods, and i can still do a good sized tree...took down a large pine leader that split off from two others thirty feet up...only eighty feet or so to the top, but when i hit the ground and unstrapped my sliding D, it felt good and rekindled a lot of memories, so here i am, back at arborsite.com...

i've been reading some of the past posts from when i wrote "Guido's Last Hurrah," a semi-fictional series of vignettes of working in the bay area back in the 80s...man, the business sure has changed since then, but not the work...i'm thinking i've got a few good stories to share here, but not sure how it might be received...last time around a few folks thought it was inappropriate to write tree stories on a professional arborist site, even if those stories were instructional...and then there were the PC crowd upset cuz i wrote things they considered "out of bounds"...

1

 

[Mad Professor]

God bless ya Mapleman. Happy to hear you are still spry enough to climb.

I'm sure we can learn a lot from your life's knowledge.

P.S. what part of Vt you located? You might be way up by the border or close by?

 

[redray46]

not sure how many of the old crew is around here...i posted a lot back in 2009, then came back briefly in 2012 after working superstorm sandy...i didn't get into doing big trees til my early 30s...this was a blessing as i learned to use my head as well as my body, incorporating kinesiology, physics and geometry into my work...so instead of trying to muscle everything, i let gravity work for me...

also i either worked for myself or contracted my climbing skills out, particularly in the sf bay area and during hurricane and ice storm cleanups from new england to florida...one thing i knew early on was if i wanted to climb into my 70s, i needed to take care of my body, and never work more than eight months a year...it worked, i'm happy to say, and in those four months off every year, i traveled a lot, sometimes taking my climbing gear with me...i've worked in australia, new zealand, hawaii, canada, alaska, etc...

now i only climb for my friends and do some side jobs...i like to say all my exes have the best looking trees in their neighborhoods, and i can still do a good sized tree...took down a large pine leader that split off from two others thirty feet up...only eighty feet or so to the top, but when i hit the ground and unstrapped my sliding D, it felt good and rekindled a lot of memories, so here i am, back at arborsite.com...

i've been reading some of the past posts from when i wrote "Guido's Last Hurrah," a semi-fictional series of vignettes of working in the bay area back in the 80s...man, the business sure has changed since then, but not the work...i'm thinking i've got a few good stories to share here, but not sure how it might be received...last time around a few folks thought it was inappropriate to write tree stories on a professional arborist site, even if those stories were instructional...and then there were the PC crowd upset cuz i wrote things they considered "out of bounds"...

I am in my late 70s , still doing a little firewood and working on saws . Came back to AS lately also .

 

[jefflovstrom]

Good to read you again!
Jeff
It was a beautiful day!

 

[Mad Professor]

I am in my late 70s , still doing a little firewood and working on saws . Came back to AS lately also .

I love taking with my seniors ,I've learned a lot.

I wish my grandparents, uncles, and parents were still with me.

 

[Mapleman]

hi jeff, how's it goin' bro?

so quick update...left vermont in 2013, but still get back for the summers and falls...i'm living in this little florida beach town that still has a bit of the ol' 60s vibe i remember from my HS daze in the 60s...you can't go any farther north or you'd be in georgia, and you can't go any farther east or you'd be in the atlantic...

did a bit of work when i first got here...working in the massive live oaks is a another ballgame, heaviest wood out there, and the leaders go on and on and on...thing in florida is most of the outfits you work for are headed by folks addicted to either pills or alcohol...it's ruined the tree industry down here...that's not to say there aren't reputable tree services, but all of those are bucket truck outfits for the most part...

hiring out as a climber here is a risky business...when you're in a tree 80+ feet up, you need groundies who will watch your back and spot those widow makers above your head...tough to do when you're texting your GF, your parole officer or looking for clean urine before a visit to the probation department...it really is that bad here, and that's why i would only work with mexicanos or guatemalans...

i've worked for guys who need an opiate cocktail just to get out of bed, and run a ponzi scheme, the money they get on a friday pays their crews for work they did the previous week...i'll write a separate post on some of my experiences here, one was with a woman who owned tree service and whose first words to me were,"I used to be a playboy bunny."

 

[Mad Professor]

hi jeff, how's it goin' bro?

so quick update...left vermont in 2013, but still get back for the summers and falls...i'm living in this little florida beach town that still has a bit of the ol' 60s vibe i remember from my HS daze in the 60s...you can't go any farther north or you'd be in georgia, and you can't go any farther east or you'd be in the atlantic...

did a bit of work when i first got here...working in the massive live oaks is a another ballgame, heaviest wood out there, and the leaders go on and on and on...thing in florida is most of the outfits you work for are headed by folks addicted to either pills or alcohol...it's ruined the tree industry down here...that's not to say there aren't reputable tree services, but all of those are bucket truck outfits for the most part...

hiring out as a climber here is a risky business...when you're in a tree 80+ feet up, you need groundies who will watch your back and spot those widow makers above your head...tough to do when you're texting your GF, your parole officer or looking for clean urine before a visit to the probation department...it really is that bad here, and that's why i would only work with mexicanos or guatemalans...

i've worked for guys who need an opiate cocktail just to get out of bed, and run a ponzi scheme, the money they get on a friday pays their crews for work they did the previous week...i'll write a separate post on some of my experiences here, one was with a woman who owned tree service and whose first words to me were,"I used to be a playboy bunny."

Let's hear about the good ole days in Vermont woods......

 

[lone wolf]

Let's hear about the good ole days in Vermont woods......

 

[Mapleman]

When I started doing trees in Vermont, there were still plenty of big elms around. That was in 1983. Climbing and working in Ulmus americana was like climbing the big blue gums in the Bay area. They separated average climbers from the really good ones. American elms grow to 115 feet, but it's the canopy spread that makes elms such a notorious species to work in. Sometimes their spread is as wide as their height.

At dbh (four feet high) big elms average four feet across. They are majestic trees that once lined avenues and streets across the northeast and mid-west. I called them the medusa tree, cuz at 30 to 50 feet up, they would snake off into every point of the compass, just like the snakes coming out of Medusa's head. Some of the really big gnarly elms I've been in had as many as a dozen major and minor leaders that covered an area a third of the size of a football field, and you had to climb each one if you were pruning or removing it. The first few years in Vermont I pruned as many big elms as I took down, but as the years passed, it was a steady diet of removals.

The Achilles Heel of elms is the elm bark beetle. The female burrows underneath the bark and lays eggs. When those eggs hatch, they in turn create furrows under the bark. Lifting up the bark of a dead elm, you'll see a central furrow with squiggly lines radiating out--that's the beetle larva, and they carry a fungus on their legs. It's the fungi that kills the elms, plugging up their vascular systems so they die of thirst.

I realized straight away if I was going to climb two to three big elms every week or so, I needed to do it in a way that wasn't only safe, but was the most ergonomical, ie, getting the most production with the least amount of strain to my body, and that meant not being a yoyo climber. The secret to being an elm man was learning to traverse climb, carrying two climbing ropes and a12-foot wooden pole saw with a hook opposite the blade. Like most big trees I've climbed, whether it be for removal, pruning or cabling, I'd walk around the tree, picking out a central, high tie-in point and choreographing my possible moves through the tree. I used a throwing pear back in those early days, and with a good bolo throw, I could hit a good high crotch usually by the third toss.

I used an aluminum 32-foot ladder to reach my climbing rope, which I'd attached to the 1/4 inch throwing line, and pulled it through the crotch. I'd snap into my climbing line and body thrust up to the crotch, then pull my climbing and pole saws up. I'd arrived at the dance in climbing boots, sans spurs if I was pruning, 2 1/2 inch hooks if it was a take down. If I felt my crotch wasn't high enough, I used the hook of my pole saw to push my safety snap higher up the tree. If I was a safety pruning or dead wooding, I'd use the pole saw to snap off dead limbs; the dead ones I couldn't snap, and live diseased limbs, I'd nailed with my climbing or Fanno hand saw. Any diseased limbs I'd cut five feet back to a healthy shoot. Back in those days, we'd only disinfected our saws on the ground before climbing.

When I finished the central leader(s), I'd tie a monkey's fist around a safety snap and either pitch it into the next crotch or use my pole saw to place and retrieve the snap. I'd double snap into my D rings, and either do a Tarzan swing or a traverse, letting slack into one line, pulling it in on the other. A tree man or tree woman has to be a horizontal as well as a vertical climber to do big canopy trees. Back in the early days in Vermont, I never saw bucket trucks doing either pruning or removals.

I remember meeting an old gnarly climber who worked for the city of New Haven, Connecticut in the bath house of a Vermont campground. He looked like he'd started out climbing on manila ropes back in the 60s. He'd seen me roll into the campground in my '83 Ford 4X4 with wooden pole saws mounted over my cab. He wasn't a man of many words, but this is what he asked me: "You a tree man?" I nodded. He turned from the sink he was washing up in, looked at me and said: "Fu*k a bunch of bucket trucks."

 

[John Bruner]

I am in my late 70s , still doing a little firewood and working on saws . Came back to AS lately also .

Hi, I'm going to turn 70 this month. I used to cut big oaks with the biggest Stihls they made back then. Now I don't even have a pickup; so I have to depend on what tree service people will give me.
I don't have any giant saws anymore; and I am all electric; from the 6" mini; to the 24" EGO CSX5000. I am going to pick up a small; (9ton) electric log splitter next month; for the knotty pieces that I can't split with an axe or a maul.