Tree Climbing Systems Explained and Compared - PLUS DEMOS

[Music] hi i'm nick bonner for treestuff.com and today we're going to talk about a variety of climbing systems methods and techniques and what the difference is between drt or mrs and srt or srs and how to transition between those two climbing systems what to learn first and uh what i think the best method of climbing is you'll have to stick around for that though so this video is part of a series kind of an impromptu or loose series but it's a companion video to our soup to nuts climbing video where we cover all of the different type of equipment that you need to climb trees we'll show a lot of that today there's going to be a little overlap between this video and that video but if you haven't checked it out check it out it covers all of the stuff you'll need ppe the different types of ropes and pulleys and things like that and while i'm going to show a lot of climbing systems today i may not elaborate on all the different options more so as i'm talking about the type of climbing and the impact that the system has had on it so first thing here is we have our drt or ddrt or mrs that's double rope technique or doubled rope or moving rope system so there's a lot of acronyms kale can pop those up on the screen everywhere and show you but essentially this is one piece of rope and it's doubled over an anchor point up in the tree but i've load tested it checked it out and everything seems to be okay so the most basic type of climbing that i will teach to people is going to be the blake hitch so you can tie in with a variety of different types of anchor knots you could use a figure eight here or uh even a bowline and use the tail but in this instance i'm just going to use two half hitches i've demonstrated this very basic technique before and i feel pretty comfortable with it so i'll set this distance here in an appropriate amount usually i check that by about how far i can reach out and then we will tie our blake's hitch here and then we'll make sure that we can tie our safety knot in the end here expertly spaced of course and this is a blank stitch so there's videos on how to tie this knot if we don't have a video on this i'll definitely make one but you can check that out here you can see the blake's hitch is able to support me so it serves that stop function and i'm able to go up and then also come down so we've got the three basics of climbing right up stop down and you can see that with the right amount of effort and some spinning i'm able to go up pretty i don't know if easy's the right word but effectively and i'm able to get up the the rope so that's the basics of ascending with a blake stitch there are other ways see here i'm able to take a foot lock and stand up but i still need sorry about the spinning here i still need to be able to advance my hitch it's certainly not easy right so if i added a foot ascender to this technique you can see but i'm able to stand but if i let my foot go back if i let my foot go back up i haven't gained anything so i need to stand and then adjust feed the sender stand and then adjust or advance that hitch this works and it's an invaluable technique that i think every climber should know you may find yourself in a situation where you need to use the end of your climbing line or as an additional positioning aid or you might find yourself in a situation where you need to do a self-rescue and knowing these techniques not needing a bunch of flashy hardware i think is really important so so here by using a basic prusik you can attach this cord to your main line that's not moving and then being careful not to put the pulley on the bridge which is what this is called not to be confused with your rope bridge you can clip the pulley underneath your blade switch and attach it to this prusik which then creates an adjustable tending point so now i'm able to sit underneath and as i'm pulling you can watch this pulley is going to pull this up and i can size this appropriately and fine tune it until it works really well maybe i needed an extra couple wraps here because you see this prussic isn't holding super duper well but that's a quick way to take this set up here to the next level when you decide that you're ready for the next set of drt systems i definitely recommend getting a rope with an eye splice on it and the reason i'll show you right now so same rope but now we're using the end with an eye splice and we're going to bring in a three hole pulley and another closed prusik cord so i'm going to choose a knot here we have a whole video on knots if you want to look at the different types of prussics that you can tie but i'm just going to pick a good trusty knot that i i hope will work on the first attempt here we'll add our pulley and our carabiner bring a second carabiner in here and go through the eye splice make sure that we're not all fouled up here we'll clip in here so this is one of the more well-known climbing systems is your hitch climber system this can be done with a variety of different pulleys hitchcords with and without a prusik and now just put it this way so it's a little easier to see you see that what we have here is that by pulling up on the bottom i'm able to tend that slack i can still hip thrust but i still need to stop and pull the slack out beneath me the big difference here is that when you're in the canopy or you're limb walking you're able to handle the slack really efficiently and it doesn't require a two-handed motion to advance that knot like you saw with the blake's hitch even with just one hand i can go like this but as i walk away from my anchor point and i'm coming back in see i can really easily tend that slack there's very little sit back and this system is really tunable it works really well so so that covers the basic advanced drt system using a hitch but there's also a ton of really great mechanical devices out there the number one mechanical drt device is going to be the petzl zigzag so here we have the newest petzl zigzag this is a really great device and this uses a chain system to simulate and replicate what the prusik does so you'll see i have to feed the rope through here this is not midline attachable most climbers i say would keep their rope keep their zigzag on the rope this process can be depending on how old your rope is or how you have the end finished can be a little bit of a bear but once it's on it's just gonna fly through and once it's set up it has all of the benefits of a hitch every one of them but it also does certain things that the hitch doesn't do well doesn't require any any customization uh or configuration it's just gonna work for every climber right out of the box unlike some other mechanicals on the market this one is really good because it's super intuitive there aren't brake blocks or you know weird levers that you have to pull it uses the same motion that you use with the hitch climber pulley and you can see that i'm already showing you that same action right instead of pulling down on the hitch you pull down on this chain and it is really really smooth i gotta say there's not a mechanical on the market srs drs or anything that is as smooth as the zigzag right it's just a great all-around system as we move away from the zigzag end away or away from drt or mrs we start to add in an extra point of friction if we want to climb srt or srs i mean i'm going to get these acronyms confused i'm sure of it before the end of this so when you are moving from a hitch based system so you have your hitch climber pulley and your hitch you can add in extra friction above that using a rope wrench and after i'm done demonstrating what the zigzag has done i'll show a rope wrench system with the fusion tether this is uh this rope wrench is on a rope logic fix tether which is very similar um and it works with say the hitch climber pulley and a prussic but we'll show a rope wrench system here in just a second petzl with the chicane it really did a great job it's got a two button open here and you see inside much like a rope wrench it's going to apply a bend in the rope when you pull down on it and that's going to give the climbing system beneath it in this case a zigzag the extra friction that it requires to work now the zigzag is only configurable with this one specific carabiner all right so you do have to make sure you have the right petzl h frame but once you have this set up it's going to work like the friction hitch and rope wrench that we're going to demonstrate here shortly but it has that smoothness that you would associate with a zigzag and it has that intuitive use that you don't really need to teach anyone how to do anything different a rope runner pro for example or in a kimbo which we'll show here in a second but it's a different motion it's not like just using a hitch so it's definitely a little different this is a really nice setup if i had to say that there's a downside to the zigzag chicane it's that it's not midline attachable and it doesn't go to zero the same way with a rope runner taking a big swing or something like that you can disengage it pretty much to zero and then feather it back on but if you're doing a limb walk and you're running back out it can be really difficult to break both of these and to get it where there's no friction and sometimes that little bit of friction as you're trying to fight can be i think problematic overall i think the zigzag chicane is a really premium srs system despite some downsides but i think it's a great example of how you can transition from drt to srt or mrs to srs with an extension of the same hardware and we see that same thing like i just mentioned with the hitchclimber pulley and the prusik that go on there so let me uh put this rope away and we're gonna switch over to this other fixed line now all right so uh here we have a fixed single line and we're going to show uh what a rope wrench system looks like so we talked about how you could take your hitch climber pulley your prusik and your carabiners that you already had and you could add a rope wrench to it that works great tens of thousands of people are doing that now you're seeing these new stiff tethers come out and they are rigid tethers i guess you would say and they are really uh there's a reason that people like them and i think it's because it's a really superior experience you see there's nothing to drop with the carabiner we actually have a video just a whole series of videos just on this product i made a couple videos the tree thinking team made a couple videos so it's a really good um a really good option to have so i'll come on here i'll tie another nice reliable hitch and then we'll use this to talk a little bit about some of the general benefits of srs climbing or srt and the rope wrench system and then we'll move on to the mechanical srs or srt systems that are not based on like the premise of a hitch or like the zigzag um jeez i'm talking too much and not looking at what i'm doing i forgot to put the rope in there so just to show you everybody makes mistakes all right so there we go we're all set up now so i caught that in my little check there goes to show you why you should always check your check your gear so here we are we're set up and i think you can you can kind of envision how there could have been that hitch climber pulley the rope doubled over this is very similar you can see it stops it goes down and it presumably goes up the difference the biggest difference between srt and drt is that you don't have that downward strand to pull on you don't have that built-in innate mechanical advantage but it actually results that mechanical advantage while it makes it easier to pull in drt you have to put twice the amount of effort in to go up the distance because you have to pull twice as far with srs or srt there's a much heavier reliance on having a foot ascender i would say that a foot ascender is an srt necessity we have a whole video on photo centers you can check out too but here when i stand you see that i'm going up right the full distance of my step now i'm demonstrating this nice and slow i don't have a knee ascender a chest harness a lanyard over my shoulder or anything like that to help tend this if i had a chest harness here something holding this to this when i stood up you would see it going up like this automatically then you think about incorporating another foot in with a haas or a knee ascender from petzl or something like that and suddenly you're able to climb a lot easier even in this short demo you know when i was hip thrusting i was getting out of breath i mean in four or five strokes here when i'm using my foot but very easy much easier so i think that's one of the biggest differences of srt versus drt the other really noticeable difference is that when you bend this rope say there's a tree branch here and you bend it around here and then say it you know it goes around another branch you know and it's over here right the amount of friction at this system is the same no matter what right it doesn't matter how many things you've wrapped this rope around because this is moving independently on the rope when you think about drt in the same scenario if you bend this rope this way any movement that you're doing now has two additional points of friction the rope has to bend across my arm you take that through a second bend and now you you might not even be able to move right three four bends for sure you're not able to feed the slack and pull it from your anchor point to where you're at so all right differences benefits to srt is that direct input right one foot of push goes one foot in this you you have to lift it two feet right because it has to go up and then you have to take up all that distance so more direct action and then a benefit of more controlled and predictable friction at any point throughout the climb right add in the fact that with srs you're able to rely more on your legs and less on your upper body and the reasons really start to mount up why you see lots of climbers switching to or using srt srs predominantly in their systems that being said i highly recommend highly recommend and would say as a requirement almost that all climbers know how to climb mrs drti i mean you have to but you should know how to use the most basic techniques that i demonstrated today which are going to be tying that blake's hitch with no extra hardware you know just using the two half hitches or a figure eight or a bow line down there at the bottom but being able to climb position yourself secure yourself without using all this extra hardware i think is going to be a real benefit last thing i want to touch on today are these premium mechanical devices we're going to talk about two the best two the only two i think that are really worth considering this is the not rope runner pro we have a whole series of videos on this product this is i think probably the best mechanical out there i'm fairly partial to it um i'm gonna go ahead and put it on here and you can see some of the differences in the way that these two devices work right off the bat so here's the rope runner pro and here's the akimbo all right there's no denying that the akimbo is a just a gorgeous and simple piece of equipment it's very elegant neil who is one of our engineers behind the camera is literally salivating as he sees this thing he loves it i think as much as everyone who sees it once you get it on the rope which it is super easy to do so it's going to look like this so these mechanical devices are similar to prusix right they provide a clamping or a bending force to the rope that slows you down and is able to be modulated the rope runner uses a bend up here which is really similar to a rope wrench which bends the rope the same way right um and then it uses two compressive spots so there's a compression here and a compression here the akimbo again you see that similar bend that's put in the rope by the chicane the rope runner the rope runner pro they're all building off of what kevin introduced with the rope rope wrench originally the difference here is that the akimbo has traded size weight and complexity of putting it on for two points of friction they make up for only having two by having a really high level of adjustability all these bollards inside here can be turned to provide different friction settings uh dependent on your rope or weight that's definitely a feature it can be a lot to to fine-tune sometimes and i think you see reports uh by people that maybe it's a little tough to fine-tune on the flip side you see a lot of complaints about the rope runner being a little bulkier a little heavier a little harder and slower to get on the rope um you know some people say it's pseudo midline attachable because it's kind of a pain in the butt you know i think that both devices have their pros and cons and overall they're both great and they're they're both made by awesome inventors who have just really contributed a lot both of these devices work the same way i won't give too exhaustive of a demonstration there are videos about both of these products obviously both of them feature a tending point here to attach to a chest harness and over the shoulder or something like that and both of them are going to let you down by pulling down on the upper bird of either device so i think ultimately you're going to be really happy with either of these two devices if you decide to go the route of a full mechanical they both work really well and were designed by field inventors guys that are out there using this gear every day and making it what it is so really high quality stuff i hope that uh that this video was helpful that we were able to cover some of the basics if you didn't know how all this gear worked before i think at least now you have a picture of how it works you know if you want to start incorporating knee ascenders and chest harnesses definitely check that stuff out i highly recommend a chest harness and a knee ascender you definitely have to have a foot a center we have videos on all that stuff and you can find all that at tree stuff and on our youtube and all these items everything we sell is five percent off every day with the coupon code arborist so thanks so much for watching and i really hope that this was helpful cheers

Channel: TreeStuffdotcom

Views: 115,674

Rating: 4.9005327 out of 5

Keywords: tree, treestuff, stuff, trees, arborist, arbor, arboriculture, climb, climbing, treestuff.com, wesspur, bartlett, sherrill, sherrilltree, tree climbing, gear, equipment, product, abr

Id: 4JX2Dcm9i20

Length: 23min 49sec (1429 seconds)

Published: Wed May 12 2021