Climbing News

Before Bartlett Arborist Supply moved to the country roads of Marlette Michigan, over 100 years ago the company started in a small home in Detroit ' Michigan's Motor City. But there's more to Detroit than just cars, abandoned buildings, and the current uprise of the city center.
Belle Isle is a beautiful 982 acre island rich in nature, history, and community. You cross over the Detroit River by bridge, leaving the cement jungle and high rise buildings behind to find yourself traveling down a road that will bring you to beaches, boats, historic buildings, parks, even an aquarium, and an astounding Conservatory holding everything from 40 ft tall tropical plants, delicate cactuses, and a fern garden, to rare flowering plants and fruit trees.

One of the most interesting things about tree work is the way that we all tend to learn the trade. We learn from those around us, and in many companies this is all the training we get. A great term I heard in the past is that we are all 'Work Isolated,' meaning that we might all essentially be doing the same thing, but we may be doing it completely different because we never really see the way that other companies are doing it. This was very true before the rise of the Internet and social media such as Facebook and Instagram. Now we have the ability to see what someone else is doing on the other side of the globe in a matter of minutes! So let me tell you a story from my past from right about the time that the tree industry was discovering Facebook!

Several years ago I remember looking through an arborist supply catalog while sitting in the bucket truck at lunch. In it I saw an ad for a pair of chainsaw pants that cost $300 and my mind was blown! 'Who in the hell would pay $300 for a pair of pants?' was all I could muster under my breath. The guys sitting next to me felt the same way! That was crazy! Our blue jeans cost a fraction of that and I could buy 10, heck 15 pair for the price of this one pair of pants! But, I must say, the thought of having a pair of chainsaw pants had planted a small seed inside of my head, even if I was bewildered about how I could afford a pair!

Have you ever been up in a tree and needed to lift some limbs, maybe to clear a roof or overhand, but also needed to immediately have some sort of friction on the rope because the pieces were too heavy for your ground guy to hold them? Many times when I was doing line clearance, we would find ourselves in these situations where we were lifting limbs off of or over power lines, but also needed at immediate friction to help us lower the limbs. We tried to have someone lifting while the other was taking up slack with the Port a Wrap, but that never really kept all the slack out of the system, and if the piece came off too early, there were way too many hands near the Port a Wrap to let something run at the correct time. So, as always, Kevin Bingham, who invented the Rope Wrench and Rope Runner, came up with a super cool use for the already popular Rope Wrench: the Rigging Wrench!

Have you ever been out on a limb with your climb line attached to the ring on your bridge while also trying to use your lanyard as a second tie-in, but as you lean way out there you notice your rope and lanyard are turning your bridge all around in a circle? This is a headache that can easily cause you frustration, but also, in a rescue scenario, cause the rescue to take far longer than it should because of an avoidable misconfiguration of gear. There is, however, a really easy way to fix this little dilemma: a swivel!