Three days, three white pines

3 days, 3 white pines photo collection

Day 1 - Arcadia
Ponderosa was visiting from Colorado the weekend before last, we met in Rhode Island and headed to Arcadia Management Area to find some trees. As it turns out when they say \"management\" they mean it. It's a huge area of woods on the Connecticut border but it appears to have gone through several rounds of timber removal, at least the area we explored. We found an area of largish white pine that I'd located using GoogleEarth, picked a decent white pine overlooking a pond and climbed up. Great time hanging with Ponderosa even if he didn't want to climb the nasty looking double trunk pine I was eyeballing. Good decision, we'd probably still be there.



Day 2 - Nasty White Pine
Ok, so I can always go out on my own and find a messed up tall white pine to climb. This one completely rejected many, many slingshot throws, basically the target branch was at the top of the range of my Sidewinder (from the angle I was shooting). I did get at least 5 throws over the branch and many more just under but the limb was so textured I couldn't get the bag to drop. Finally I hung the bag. At this point the sun was about to set so with renewed inspiration I went for a slightly lower less desirable TIP. That worked, my hang line sent me out in space over a steep slope down to a stream, that was cool. Up I went to see first hand that this tree had all kinds of busted out limbs from last winter's storms, it's in an exposed position in the woods. My SRT route ended at a big hanger which I slightly rearranged to get by, it was too long and heavy to set loose without rigging it. I switched to a long and short lanyard and climbed higher, now with the sun pretty much down. It was no picnic with a leaning narrow top with many broken stubs, not the friendly crown you like to find in a WP. I think this was a 120+ footer, I didn't go all the way to the top, it was going to be a bit of a grind solo in the dark. So I stopped at a reasonable perch, shot some photos and headed down. The good news was that I spotted some other tall ones that looked to have more friendly \"rooms\" at the top.



Day 3 - Meg's first woods white pine SRT climb
That's more like it, my wife joined me for a climb on a beauty of a white pine. Every time I bring my wife Meg on a climb she complains (in a good way) that the tree just isn't tall enough. After an intro SRT climb on one of our neighborhood red oaks we headed to the woods to climb. I left a tag line in a lovely WP on a previous climb, used that to install a trunk anchored static line and then climbed up and hung my 11mm Tachyon with a backed running bowline for a second SRT access line. Meg started climbing on a Yo-Yo system. After giving her a good head start I followed up on the second SRT line using a Tree Frog system. We continued side-by-side to the SRT TIPs and switched over to alternating lanyard technique to climb up to a \"room\" at the top where the tree divides into three short leaders that are the top of the tree. Meg declared our perch tall enough, we were sitting up in the 100+ foot range. The sun went down while we enjoyed watching dragonflies and small birds moving through the canopy. We descended to the SRT TIPs and rappelled out in the dark which was quite pleasant.



-moss