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'You're about 80 feet high," instructor Jamie Robertson shouts. "Don't look down!"
I look down. Robertson has broken my concentration. And although tall and muscular, he now looks like a dwarfed squirrel on the ground. Holy crap.
Still, I can do this. I can climb this tree. I even asked its permission.
Along with telling the tree your name and hugging it, it's part of the climbing ritual here in Wakefield, Que. I would rather say all that stuff in my head (alone, maybe, but with someone else watching?), but Robertson makes me do it anyway.
And that's okay. I'm doing whatever he says. He is, after all, the guy holding the rope of my rock-climbing harness as I scale a 40-metre-tall, 12-storey white pine.
At first, that simply means using a ladder to reach low branches. But now I'm climbing actual limbs on this 200-year-old tree, one after the next, remembering Robertson's rule: Always keep three points — either one foot and two hands, or two feet and one hand — on the wood.
I wish I had kept my eyes on the tree too. My heart is now racing. Possibly with terror.
But I take a moment to refocus. And that's when I finally look at the tree I'm clutching and get acquainted with it for real. It's a gorgeous old crone, sticky and fragrant with pine sap, full of life and warm to the touch.
I also realize something surprising: I'm not actually scared. Instead, I feel euphoria. And I feel weirdly safe up here. I climbed trees as a kid — and when I was 20 I once spent three days camped inside a hollowed-out redwood tree in California — but surely those experiences aren't enough to explain my comfort.
It must be ancestral memory at work. For millions of years, trees were our refuge from predators. Perhaps it's all encoded in our DNA. As Robertson says, "Every person who climbs this tree has some sort of profound, life-enhancing experience."
A former high-rise window installer, Robertson runs a nature and tree-climbing business called Wild Adventures in the woods about a half-hour north of Ottawa. In the past four years, he has harnessed everyone from foreign ambassadors posted in Ottawa to members of the Swiss national ski team to Ontario school kids — as well as a woman battling throat cancer.
"Trees have healing energy," he says. "And the climbers themselves feel energized and powerful at the top, as if they've overcome something really huge."
Perhaps that's why tree climbing is gaining popularity. At Tree Top Trekking in Barrie, Ont., climbing bookings have tripled in the past three years. New Tribe, an Oregon company that sells equipment for recreational tree climbing, has sold almost 1,500 tree-climbing saddles this year — up 34 per cent from 2003.
And interest is expected to keep growing. Peter Jenkins, the founder of an Atlanta-based organization called Tree Climbing International, predicts that in less than 10 years recreational tree climbing — or what he calls "vertical meditation" — will eclipse both rock climbing and caving.
So where to get in on the action?
While tree-climbing outfits are still in their infancy, Tree Top Trekking is a good place to start. Located at Horseshoe Resort, the operator not only straps people into harnesses for climbing courses adapted to age, height and strength, it also offers 70 different team-building "tree games," where people move between trees on bridges, ropes and swings.
"Interest is massive," manager Mike Wake says. "We're booked solid every weekend. People just want to be in the trees."
In British Columbia, meanwhile, there's Tree Climbing Canada. Founded by Michelle Morris and her husband — who taught themselves to climb from a handbook a few years ago — the volunteer group facilitates climbs in the lower mainland outside Vancouver. While there are only 20 members so far, Morris says interest is quickly building: "We're just at the taking-off point out here."
