Toughest trees to climb

[MartinsTreeSvc]

"There's old tree men and there's bold tree men, but there's no old, bold tree men."

What's the toughest kind of tree you've had to climb? I'm talking species here, but you can relate an individual tree too.

For sheer agony, my choice is a spruce with a lot of dead wood, with pin oaks a distant second. In Hawaii Tiger's Paw and Monkey Puzzle tie some climbers in knots. But for overall toughness...

BIG BLUE GUMS with peeling bark and the first branch 3 feet in diameter fifty feet up. Finished one up at UC Med Center with the headlights on highbeam.

Osage orange with thorns

 

[HuskyShepherd2016]

What I’m going to say is by far NOT the highest tree but in my tree climbing experience through my life, the first time I ever climbed up into a larger mesquite tree, was the last time I ever did it, and never again will I. I did have to climb up one that got big enough to have to climb up and prep it some, due to its location and tangled into power lines and other stuff, and it was on the side of a rocky slope. I used my limb saw to knock off as many of those venomous barbs as I could as I climbed. I fell out of it twice because those two inch long thorns bit me from all angles and every time it did it jerked me and down I went. And the branches are all twisty and unpredictable when they fall, and hard enough to destroy several chains.

I’ll never climb a mesquite tree again.

 

[poleframer]

My climbing days are long past. For about 15 years back in the 80's and 90's I did a lot of cone collection contracts for the Forest Service, and BLM.
I've climbed in most districts of all the national forests in Oregon.
Typical day would be climbing to the top of a dozen 150' trees, some smaller, many larger.
I've climbed thousands (low thousands) of doug firs, pondo pines, larch, lodgepole pine, western white pine, and others I forget.
One year we had a contract up the north mackenzie river for sugar pine.
Ya cant spur sugars they had to be ladder climbed with these 8" wide by 10' tall stackable ladders.
One fatty I remember well was over 6' dbh and 120' to the first branch. you're not supposed to set more than 7 ladders, but I had 12 up that tree, and they were corkscrewing around it, had to half jump to get in the branches, the lower ones were as big as my thigh.
Still sends a bit of a shiver remembering it.
I'm in awe of guys like Gerry Beranek who went up huge trees with friggen 090s.

 

[lloyd786]

american elm there's no high point to the tree its gos out 50 ' tom trees

But they’re strong and can hold themselves when rigging. I like elms. Just not splitting them for firewood.