I was expecting a rock climber, not trees :D That's a nice surprise.
There's a lot of really cool equipment for climbing, not just carabiners but various sorts of brakes, rappelling, anchoring, ascending, descending, traversing, etc. – most of which I don't understand. I feel like I'm gawking at Batman in awe anytime I'm near one of those folks.
It'd be a fun modern-day competition to try to get people to scale a castle wall and break into the keep using this gear...
Years back I went to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens with a date and stumbled upon an Arborist competition happening. I knew of the word Arborist but was ignorant of what that entailed and wound up learning a lot.
The competition had an Arborist get their climbing line strung up and anchored, climb the tree to touch 5 flags dispersed around the tree within a set time limit. The flagged branches had bells tied to them so they had to be nimble as well as fast. Touching a flag earned them points and ringing a bell cost them points. Of course one flag was located far out on a thin branch making it very difficult to reach without ringing the bell. They also had to do no damage to the tree in the process.
It was very interesting and I was talking to one of the competitors who explained their profession and how they travel around climbing trees for a variety of reasons from forestry and conservation to basic tree pruning. They are also required to be certified and that is handeled by the International Society of Arboriculture (I.S.A.) He also mentioned "target pruning" which is a term I was unaware of so I learned something. It certainly seems like an interesting and fun profession. I need to hire one to check out my big oak that is in need of a trim.
Tree climbing is incredible fun. The devices used are agile, and in North America at least, climbing techniques are expressive and personalized to the point of still being the wild west.
The ISA/TCIA host yearly regional climbing competitions. They're going on now. For anyone who hasn't seen what it's like for a skilled climber to rip around in a tree, they're open to the public, and I can't recommend them enough:
https://www.itcc-isa.com/events/calendar
Neat! Looks like there's one coming up in Seattle. Might have to drive up for that.
Can public audience members just show up out of the blue (wander out of the woods?) or do we have to sign up or buy a ticket ahead of time? Not going to climb, just watch and clap giddily.
He seems to be doing both, but with a focus in trees lately.
<'94: lots of off-rope rock and tree climbing
1994: participated in my first ropes course event
1996: learned to belay
2001: tied my first prusik and first self-belayed climb
2006: first trad lead and bought my first full trad rack
2007: climbed my first redwood while roped in and ran my first ropes course event
'07>: been professionally training and leading tree climbing and ropes work ever since. "
Both is fun. Also freestyle combinations, there might be a tree close to a rock and then one can just use both.
> There is just such joy in other peoples passion!!!
Agreed :)
(And joy in other people's passion might just be the antidote for the "rage at other people's thought" that seems to be becoming the norm these days ...)
When it comes to online catalogs of left-field stuff my favorite is the 40 oz Archive [1] (which seems to have renamed itself since the last time I checked it almost a decade ago). It's far more whimsical and less healthy than this one but is also worth perusal if you're bored.
Oh, wow - thank you! Looking at the evolution of the Jumars in that is fascinating -- you can see them go from really clunky prototypes to looking like a modern ascender.
They're expensive but I'm a big fan of the Magnetron series by Black Diamond. Self locking yet quick to open, but most importantly for me they don't jam up with sand like the screw lock/twist lock ones when I'm canyoneering.
From a climbing standpoint? Either the Black Diamond Hoodwire (now discontinued, and I'll guard my stock with my life) or any member of the Black Diamond Rocklock family tree.
From a general usage standpoint, Trango used to make a wiregate called the Classic Wiregate. It wasn't as easy to clip as the Hoodwire, but it was more symmetric, so you could use it for carabiner brakes and things of that nature. It was my go-to utility carabiner, but since it wasn't as flashy as crabs meant specifically for the rope end of a quickdraw, it never sold well enough and so they took it off the market. Turns out that a purely functional, no-frills carabiner couldn't compete with objectively worse carabiners (the Black Diamond Light D, or ugh the Omega Pacific Doval) because it didn't look as "classic".
Many manufacturers make terrifyingly small full-strength carabiners, but my experience with them is that they are so small that they're difficult to operate, so I have a surprising number of effectively keychain carabiners that are actually rated for climbing usage.
Sidebar, for life-saving equipment, climbers are bizarrely obsessed with how cool things look. The parenthetically mentioned Doval was a terrible carabiner, but it looked kind of neat, like a classic car with modern influences. It had an ovalized exterior, but a D-shaped interior, so it had all the clippability problems of an oval carabiner (can you determine where the gate's axle is, purely by feel, in under a second? not on a smooth oval carabiner), while maintaining the D's principle weakness (and why oval carabiners remain popular): under bodyweight and higher loads, a nearly-correctly positioned d-shaped carabiners will shift into the correct position, leading to a nerve-wracking drop. Oval carabiners will not do this under bodyweight loads (but also might not when faced with higher loads, somewhat compromising their ultimate strength, which is, because of the design, also somewhat lower than a d-shaped crab). When hanging on really tenuous anchors, that little drop has caused said anchors to fail, so direct-aid climbers have favored oval carabiners, even though they tend to be objectively worse carabiners in every other respect.
I'm not a climber but I love the Omega Pacific D non-locking carabiner, it's size and shape makes it fit through molle webbing on Goruck backpacks nicely so it sits flush and is a convenient place to attach random things as needed.
I miss the old "bayonet lock" ones, like on this page - they don't make them anymore. The special thing about them was they were "bistable" in both the locked and the unlocked positions, whereas twistlocks these days automatically go into the locked position if you let go of them. For the obvious counter-argument, that you can forget to lock them: that's true of screw gates as well, and yet we still use them.
Carabiners have vintage popularity trends just like any other consumer object. If anyone has a Black Diamond Vaporlock Magnetron sitting around, you could probably get ~$100 for it on eBay right now, about 5x the original retail price.
I thought the pinnacle of this was the hooded wiregates, but I guess those are hard to manufacture cheaply, so they've become hard to find. I was planning to replace all of my old wiregates with BD Hoodwires, and then suddenly you couldn't find them anymore.
There's a lot of really cool equipment for climbing, not just carabiners but various sorts of brakes, rappelling, anchoring, ascending, descending, traversing, etc. – most of which I don't understand. I feel like I'm gawking at Batman in awe anytime I'm near one of those folks.
It'd be a fun modern-day competition to try to get people to scale a castle wall and break into the keep using this gear...