Still in Cairns, just back from exploring the Daintree rainforest. David and Julia from Tree Tech in Cairns were kind enough to share some of their favourite trees, tucked away in the forests around the city. The picture on the left shows David mid-traverse between two enormous xanphostemons, with Julia visible working the camera in one of the unions behind.
Julia recently placed third in the women’s grade at the ATCC, as well as being awarded the ‘best new competition climber’ prize.
The June/July issue of the Australian ArborAge is out now, and one of the cover stories is an article about the let this one run roadtrip, written by Joe Harris of into trees. ArborAge will be covering the whole trip, with a regular article along with photos of where the crew have been, and scoresheets from all the tree climbing competitions along the way.
In addition, the current issue includes an article on aerial rescue, written as a response to Graeme McMahon’s article in the Feb/March issue of the same magazine. The debate about aerial rescue – in particular the requirement for a second climber to be present at every job site to conduct an aerial rescue if necessary – is a topic that was covered in some depth at a tree rescue day with Sherbrooke Tree Service earlier in the year. We hope to return to it in September, with plans for a multi-disciplinary two-day workshop on aerial rescue, to be organised jointly with representatives from several responding bodies. Watch this space.
Another big block of driving, down through Kakadu and onto the Savannah Way, then further south to the Barkly highway and east to the coast: into trees is now in Cairns, spending a day regrouping before heading into the Daintree rainforest.
Total kilometres on the roadtrip so far, counting all the diversions, digressions and deviations: 24,000. Coming up to 4 months since the NSW competition, which seems a very long way away now. But we’ll be back in Sydney soon – in just three weeks in fact – as we enter the last runup to the International Tree Climbing Championship…
