One criticism that has often been levelled at the groundbreaking ART Ropeguide by climbers using ‘traditional’ two-ring cambium savers (or even more traditional natural crotching) is that the Ropeguide cannot be installed from the ground. In the video below, leading Western Australian climber Brad Bowden demonstrates that this assumption is definitely not true.
Brad would be the first to agree that this technique is not one which would be required often – the usual approach of installing an access line and using SRT to head straight to the top, or installing a mid-line anchor point on the access line, would in most cases be a straightforward way of achieving the same result. However, tree climbers who become comfortable with this technique might well find situations in which it was the most effective solution for the problem – possibly for a large removal, where the lowest branches could be cut-and-dropped in small pieces?