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The Old Yankee - Tree Climbing

 
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PostPosted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 1:06 pm    Post subject: The Old Yankee - Tree Climbing Reply with quote

Back before tree climbing had become a sport, I was down in the Smokies with some rock climbing pals about to tackle a rock wall when we realized some locals beat us to it. While we were waiting, Smitty noticed an enormous pine tree towering above the canopy of the forest not much more than a mile away. We were borred and had time to kill, so off we went for a little side excursion.

We lugged our equipment cross-country through dense thickets for about an hour before we finally stumbled across the mammoth tree along the edge of a small clearing. It was a monument to trees everywhere. There were broken limbs that had fallen to the ground larger than some mature oaks. The top of the tree towered so high that it hurt my neck to look up at it and the base of the trunk was about ten feet thick. We could also see that there were plants and sapplings growing on it's mossy limbs. This was obviously the oldest tree in the area.

The side of the tree facing the clearing was going to be a cinch to climb. The lowest limb was only about ten feet off the ground as compared to most trees in the forest which had limbs a good twenty or thirty feet up. We could climb from limb to limb like a latter for what looked like clear to the tippy top, so we opted against using any type of rope protection.

Smitty went first followed by Luther and then myself. Climbing the tree proved to be much more difficult than what I had immagined. Each limb was covered in damp moss and a thin slippery layer of soil. This made holding on with hands extremely tricky. I also had to be careful about making sure my feet were not going to slip.

At about half way up just after reaching up to grab a hold on a limb, I stuck my hand into a very sticky glue-like mess. When I pulled my hand away, a glob of tree sap fell square into my left eye. The sap stung and burnt so bad that I could barely see out of either eye. I needed to wash it out, but I had left my water bottle on the ground. I yelled up to Luther about my predicament and he was kind enough to climb down to help guide me back.

After washing the stinging mess from my eye, I could see that Smitty was nearly clear to the very top. He wasn't the most athletic individual and was beginning to accomodate a beer gut. This made Luther and I kind of nervous as the limbs were bending quite a bit under his weight. Just as he was about to grab the top of the tree, the limb he was standing on snapped! Smitty cascaded down the trunk breaking smaller limbs and bouncing off the larger ones like a pinball. Smitty's descent was slow and painful as his ribs took most of the pounding helping to curb his falling speed. It wouldn't have been so bad if it were a smaller tree, but Smitty was falling for a good 30 seconds before he bounced off a branch for a fast free-fall.

Luther and I gasped in terror as we thought we were witnessing the death of our friend. At that very moment, as Smitty grazed the edge of the last limb, his sweat pants hooked onto a broken stub of a branch directly under his waste band. His sweat pants stretched like a bungee cord as he fell toward the ground. The massive wedgie he was receiving was enough to nearly stop his fall, but once his pants were stretched a good eight feet from waste to branch, his pants exploded into ribbons of cloth and he hit the ground belly-smacker style!

There was Smitty laying face down with his bare butt exposed to the world and his pants blown open like an exploding cigar! Luther and I immediately cracked into an uncontrolable laughter as Smitty tried to figure out what happened to his pants. He was ok with brused pride and brused ribs, but he vowed never to climb trees again.

This story may or may not be true.
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