№ 4: The Off-Season
It’s the off-season for climbing. Until spring comes, I’m firmly bound to the ground. I’ve been asked before about why I don’t climb in the winter, and so I thought this month that I would go into the reasons for this.
The biggest is safety. I live in southern Wisconsin, and it’s rather cold outside in the winter — the daily mean January temperature in my city is about 19°F (-7°C). And I’m a person who gets cold particularly easily. So, even to do something athletic, I’m going to need to bundle up in heavy clothes that will interfere with climbing. Thick boots would prevent me from being certain about how securely I’ve centered my foot on a branch. A winter coat will make my body bulky and awkward, restricting my freedom of movement. The more that my clothes separate me from the tree, the harder it is to move fluently and safely within it. Plus, those nice and somewhat pricey warm layers are likely to get cut or abraded by bark and branches.
By itself, I could probably learn to work through this problem. Maybe with some thoughtful purchases of tough, athletic clothing, and careful practice to accustom myself to moving under those circumstances. But, there are other impediments.
Right now, trees around me look like this:
Branches can be snowy, and depending on the day, even a bit icy. While I haven’t tried it, I’m assuming this wouldn’t give me the surest grip or footing. This is also the reason why, in warmer weather, I don’t climb after a rainstorm until the trees have dried.
More importantly, though: in the winter, I can’t always tell the quick from the dead. You see, trees commonly shed branches throughout their life. When climbing, you will often encounter healthy living branches intermingled with dead ones that are in various states of decay. These dead branches can sometimes take years to fall from the tree naturally. They are often brittle and will not safely support the weight of a person. So, it’s important to avoid them.
However, while dead branches are sometimes obvious, like in the above photo, they can also look a lot like live ones. An easy way to tell safer live branches from more dangerous dead ones is to see if they’ve got leaves. In the winter, deciduous trees lose their leaves, and so I no longer have that easy indicator of which branches are safer. To be fair, the most dangerous (i.e., likely to snap) dead branches tend to also look the most decayed, and thus the most dissimilar to live ones. So, it’s possible to get by without this indicator, but it’s nice to have an extra safety factor. When the weather warms enough to start climbing, I tend to stick to trees that are fairly familiar to me until the leaves start coming out.
Some of you might be thinking: “What about pine trees or other conifers? They keep their needles year round.” That’s true, but I don’t climb conifers; I don’t like getting sticky. Some people don’t mind (like the guy who wrote the Tree Climber’s Guide), but it’s not for me.
Winter climbing is just less safe, more cumbersome, and might damage my winter clothes. Again, I could probably work through it, if I waited for a dry day, stuck to a familiar tree, and bought attire that was fit to the task, but it’s a bigger hassle than I want to go through.
So, instead, I’m on a break. But, in some ways that break is welcome. True, there are days when it would be good to climb, and when I fantasize about being about to get out there. However, I expect that I appreciate climbing more when I am forced to endure its absence. Like many things, it becomes a little less pleasurable via repeated exposure, and by the time summer has passed, I’ve been in enough trees that my enjoyment is a bit dulled—though it still remains fun.
Nonetheless, I’ve thought about alternatives to taking this enforced break. I could take a vacation, visiting somewhere with more favorable weather — as long as it’s inexpensive to reach, and has some climbable deciduous trees that retain their foliage. Maybe in a future letter we’ll explore what “climbable” means to me.
Another option that I sometimes wonder about: fake climbing trees. Just as gyms have climbing walls to simulate scrambling up actual rocks, one could imagine some sort of wooden structure that mimics a tree. In my mind, it’s something modular: a trunk-like wooden pole, with slots cut into it. Via those slots, you could attach various “branches,” and easily rearrange them at will to create new experiences. I don’t have the means to make anything like this, nor really the space in my home to use it, but it would be cool to have nonetheless. Perhaps someone will one day establish a tree-climbing gym.
In the meanwhile, I watch and wait for the coming of spring.