TRAVEL FEATURES
Branch out, and climb a tree
ALTO, Ga.—My daughter Nina and I looked up, tilting our heads back. Way back.
Fifty feet up in a massive white oak tree, there were a pair of sturdy hammocks attached to branches.
"That," said Genevieve Summers, "is your lodging."
We would be sleeping that night in the tree. Not on a platform in a tree or in an eco-lodge in a tree but tucked into the branches as if we were birds in nests.
We would get to our beds by climbing the tree, using special knots that would allow us to use our leg muscles and body weight to do the heavy lifting. We would climb as the sun went down, sleep all night in our "tree boats" and wake to see the sun rise.
You are either a person who finds that notion appalling or entrancing.
Nina, 18, and I were among the latter. We would be very, very happy.
We came to northern Georgia, about 80 miles north of Atlanta, to commune with trees on a new level. Here, on her 13 acres of forested land, Summers teaches people how to climb high into trees. She is an instructor of a little-known activity called recreational tree climbing. It is a sport for some, an eco-adventure for others and a spiritual practice for a few, but to outsiders, it is a puzzlement.
Climbing trees? The thing kids do?
The thing kids do if they've got harnesses, ropes and an 80-foot oak in their back yard. Kids can indeed do it—in fact, their small size makes them faster and better at it than their parents—but it takes instruction and equipment.
Arborist Peter Jenkins began offering that instruction and equipment in 1983, when he opened Tree Climbers International in Atlanta, the first recreational tree-climbing school in the country.
"I kept getting requests from my clients to take them up into trees because I was having so much fun," said Jenkins, a former rock climber who has trained about 100 instructors who now teach throughout the U.S. and the world.
Summers is one of them. She saw a photograph in a magazine of a young girl playing the violin up in a tree she had climbed under Jenkins' tutelage, and Summers was captivated. Unafraid of heights—Summers was working as a chimney sweep at the time—she took one of Jenkins' courses, became a TCI instructor and then started her own program in 1993 on her property in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains.
At Dancing with Trees, Summers, 57, lean, weathered and extremely fit, offers adventures—guided climbs into trees—and beginning and advanced tree-climbing courses. It is a tiny operation, essentially Summers and her land, though she also is available to travel wherever people want to climb a tree (and have one that is safe and legally accessible).
Some people climb trees for the physical challenge. But for Summers, climbing is the means to a spiritual end—the experience of being up in a tree, surrounded by leaves, wind and silence.
"I just feel more alive when I'm up there," she said. "Sometimes when I'm climbing, I just burst into song. I really just get lost—or found—up there. I don't think about what's going on on the ground or in the rest of the world. I'm up there with the tree. I just feel more alive. I feel peaceful. I feel quieter."
And the more time spent in a tree, the more peaceful the experience. "My desire is for people to slow down, in hopes of taking in more of what's going on around you as well as what's inside you," she said.
Thus, the twist on recreational tree climbing that Summers offers: tree camping.
You can spend the night in a tree. Not on a sleeping platform in a tree but in the tree itself, suspended among the branches. In the morning, Summers serves you a treetop breakfast. Like a B&B, only without the first B.
So it was that we found ourselves on a warm evening driving up a gravel road that led to an A-frame cabin. Summers was waiting, sweaty from tying ropes and our tree boats into the tree where we going to sleep. The oak was "Tonya"—as befits her view of trees as nurturing entities, she names them.
Before the fun, we talked safety. Recreational tree climbing is not regulated, and instructors are not licensed, but Summers follows the protocols she helped develop at TCI. Though the job of professional arborist is one of the nation's most deadly, Summers and TCI say there have been no serious injuries in recreational tree climbing.
She handed us our equipment—a harness, a helmet, a head lamp, a ditty bag, carabiners, a head net if we need protection from bugs—and showed us how to use it.
Then she addressed "the big question."
The bathroom facilities would be ... where?
In a plastic jar with a screw-on cap. Summers explained the drill: We were to kneel in our tree boats, pull our pants down around the harness leg straps and slide the jar beneath us.
"You've just got to be careful," she said unnecessarily. "And remember: Try to get that lid on good and tight."
Summers led us in stretches and a meditation. Then she asked each of us to talk about our relationships with trees.
Nina talked about all the times she had climbed trees on her own and the comfort it gave her to observe the world from a leafy height. I told the two-part tree story that has informed my life— about the shrub a childhood friend and I rescued from bulldozers that turned out to be a spectacular oak tree that now towers over our apartment complex, and about the tree that years later stopped a boulder from dragging me over the edge of the Grand Canyon.
If Summers anticipated push-back on the touchy-feely stuff, she wasn't going to get it from us.
But enough of the love; it was time for the ropes.
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