Maybe I'm biassed but I feel that tree climbers should be about the best climbers on the planet.
If we climb only SRT, no matter how good you are, there will be other SRT-based climbers from whatever other discipline that are going to be better.
If you hang with the traditional 2:1 friction hitch style, just about ANY 1:1 climber will smoke you and enjoy versatility that hitch climbers are not even aware of.
If you lock into 1:1 dual-line methods you get the same benefits of SRT and then some, but if you drop a critical piece of hardware, not knowing a simple friction hitch system could delay your work.
Knowing all three, and a few ways of going about any one of them gives us a breadth of knowledge and on-rope abilities quite beyond that of most any other climbers. Add to that the vast amount of aerial rigging exercises we can perform and together our abilities should exceed that of any other climbing discipline, anywhere.
So why subject yourself to a single rope method day after day? That's self-limiting. We climb with much more frequency than other disciplines. We're not weekend warriors. We do this stuff every working day, multiple times a day in trees which are unique to one another, requiring us to make unique decisions based on the particular tree in front of us in that moment.
Multi-system knowledge should allow us to perform the other disciplines rather seamlessly, and we should be able to do rock faces, frozen waterfalls, buildings, confined spaces, etc.
Am I wrong in thinking tree climbers should be the overall best technical climbers in the world? |