Whoa! And I'm going to attend training to be certified both for advanced felling on ground now in november, and another for climbing/removing in feb next year. Lot's of time and money will be spent and invested in this. I'm planning on starting a small business. Sound like a bad idea after reading this. Oh crap...... :bang:
Question; you guys who work in areas where there's cold winters and snow; can you still climb and do tree work in the winter season?
I can't answer the question, our winters are very mild here with no snow and I love climbing in the cold.
RE: the courses, geting training is always a good idea, but certification and experience are two different things. A lot of us started without papers, worked under someone, picked up both good and bad habits, worked for different companies and got different perspectives but generally picked up what worked and what didn't. Then we went and got certified. Here in aus, we have 2 levels of certification for climbers; cert II in arboriculture is the basic one, and cert III in arboriculture is the more advanced one. Each course takes a year, one day a week.
They are practical courses, that hold your hand and take you through the motions of setting a line, working a canopy, making cuts, rigging. They start you off spikeless and with a handsaw. Towards the end of the year you get to do a little spike work, and use chainsaws. It's almost entirely practical lessons with a few classroom days. When I did my cert II, there were guys in the class who had never used a chainsaw in their life, and guys who had been contract climbers for 20 years. The more experienced guys thought a lot of the course stuff wasn impractical because nobody works like that. If you used those methods, you could never get treework done in time to make a dollar. There were guys at the end of that cert II, who still couldn't do even the most basic of removals.
When I did my cert III, it was the same story. There were guys even at the end, after 2 years of training, who couldn't hold a climbing job for a day. It would take them 6 hours to get into the canopy, and remove a single branch; I kid you not. Getting experience working with a tree company is one of the best things you can do. Pick someone good though. Even a month will teach you a lot.
Don't get me wrong, the certification is a good thing and worth having. You'll pickup a lot of good safety info, and get some good understanding of tree work too. It certainly doesn't prepare you for running a tree company any more than getting a basic fallers ticket prepares you to be a full time faller.
Shaun
) they know that few others can do what they do, and what most would be too afraid to even think about doing. They make a living at it. They are good at it. They fricking put a GoPro camera on their head just to share to the rest of the world how cool it is what they do. How many other people can put a camera on their head for a day and share it with the world. 
