Mighty interesting- this Climber Finder feature.

It’s visually interesting to see where people are signed up as climbing. I can see the tight grouping in the southeast USA and the northeast USA as well. Possibly from the starting point of tree climbing as a recreation (technical rope and saddle climbing) that started here at the TCI school in Atlanta. But there is that tight cluster in the northeast as well. Could it be the trees? The east coast has thick populations and a wide variety of species of the climbable trees.

Now Japan has numerous climbers. I mean REALLY numerous. Japan had as its seed Atlanta (the training started here in Atlanta) added with a front page media personality, John Garthright, that took tree climbing to the top very fast with his TV shows, articles, books, and website www.treeclimbingjapan.com . Much faster than America, at this point. They too have lots of trees. The Japanese people hand planted incredible amounts of trees as a crop (tree farming) until they found a much cheaper source- America and Canada. So now you have vast forests over a century old with no harvesting in sight. And John Garthright who pushed the idea of climbing these forests for recreational purposes. Now there is visionary thinking! His other vision involves tree climbing as therapy and he has just received a degree on that subject.

But I digress. It will be interesting as other climbers sign up and we can see where this trend of technical tree climbing is going geographically.

BTW- when you toggle the bar down on the Climber Finder you get a broader view. Toggle the bar up you get a detailed road map. No doorsteps, but pretty close as far as location is concerned. I’m just getting the hang of it myself. A bit hypnotic in nature.

How many climbers on on it? Any way to contact them? How do you get on the list? Kind of a bummer than only TCI members can use it. If I knew it would be a great tool I would have no problem signing up for it; however, I don't want to blow $20 on a list I can't even preview.

Hello Bakes55, Welcome to the TCI Board and Community. I see this is your first post and you already want to have the full benefits given to you. Consider the membership as a small investment in your climbing adventures the same as the gear that you will be accumulating like many of us have thru the years of climbing. The fee is not there to make money for anyone but to keep out the people that should not have any business in here. So, stick around meet the other people, Take some formal classes, let us know who you are and where and how you become interested in Tree Climbing and the benefits of membership will become available to you if you decide to participate in a positive way.

You have to go in to your profile and enable the map feature so that you show up on it.

I think it is cool to see. I've noticed a climber or 2 in the LA area that I've not met yet!

love
nick

Actually I have been a member for about 18 months. Just search under Bakes. I'm definitly not a \"platinum boarder\" for sure but I have been around a while...even if mostly lurking. For some reason I couldn't log in anymore. Either I forgot my password/e-mail combo or something changes when the site changed. I don't mind paying the $20 (Given all that I have spent on equipment over the past little while) if it is a good tool. But if I cannot preview it then out of principle I generally don't pay up. Plus most new things like this on the web generally start out free to at least build a customer base and then charge the fee later on. That being said I was about to do it just to support the tree community folks but stopped when the registration page was not a HTTPS page.

Anyways, I think exposure to tree climbing, the gear that is used and the good people that climb needs as few hurdles as possible. If people are \"bad\" just ban them like every other message board out there.

Later

Bakes

On the website security issue, Bakes wrote: \"I was about to do it just to support the tree community folks but stopped when the registration page was not a HTTPS page.\"

Our webmaster replied to this concern with the following email message to me: \"They're right. We aren't using encrypted connection for any information passing back and forth from the user to the website. I really don't think we need to. The TCI website isn't collecting Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, date of birth, or any information that could be used for financial fraud or identity theft. I really don't think that the frequency of a person's treeclimbing would be of any monetary gain to any criminal element out there, so I don't recommend going to the expense and bother of implementing encryption.\"

On use of the Climber Finder: Every TCI member is listed in this feature by default. If you decide you don't want to be listed, you can disable your listing at any time in the \"additional info\" tab in your profile.

One of our primary concerns in setting up the Climber Finder was for security, which is why we did not/will not make this a feature available to the general public. If you're a member, the Climber Finder allows you to contact other members in a secure email which protects everyone's privacy. The search by city or zip code will give you results either in list format or map format.

As an important aside: TCI has members all over the world. And, as of this morning's stats (6 days into stats-collecting), people from 56 countries have visited our new website. Planning to travel? There's another good reason to join TCI and be part of the Climber Finder.

Hope this information is helpful.

Patty
TCI Administrator