A crash course in old-growth tree climbing (it's tree hugging's rambunctious younger sibling). Wanna come out and have some deep fun?

By Fred Haefele
Photographs by Craig Cameron Olsen

Craig Cameron Olsen

John Sieber chimneys up the twins while rubberneckers Phillip Pierce, Abe Winters, and Hope Winters (below, left to right) wait their turn

Craig Cameron Olsen

I flex my fingers and grab the two metal ascenders clamped to my climbing rope. The upper ascender is clipped to my harness, the lower to foot stirrups. They look like staple guns, work like locking ratchets. It's a two-step deal: Sit in the harness and raise the stirrups; then stand in the stirrups and raise the harness. It's about 18 inches a throw, and more than anything, it resembles the methodical crawl of an inchworm. Given that this tulip poplar is 165 feet tall, with a trunk that is 20 feet around, it seems about as fast.

As I climb higher, a woodland panorama opens up below me. Except for a few looming hemlocks, the forest is mostly hardwoods, and the light streams through the thinning tops of the taller oaks and basswoods. They are sizable trees, most of them, but even the 90-footers are dwarfed by the giant I'm dangling from. This tree is the tallest in the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, a 3,800-acre tract of old growth in western North Carolina's Appalachian Mountains. The tulip poplars here—the oldest date back to the 1600s—are among the largest living organisms east of the Mississippi. Decades ago, they escaped the logging crews that leveled these woods, and today they're being scaled by a gung-ho tribe in harnesses and helmets, packing enough rope for a direct ascent of Yosemite's Half Dome.

I arrive at the first branches breathing hard. How long did that take? Ten, 15 minutes? I've been a tree surgeon for years, but I've never been up a tree much taller than a hundred feet, and I've never climbed 90 feet without passing a single lateral branch. The limbs of this first crotch are more than two feet in diameter, too big to get my arms around. I lean over in my climbing harness and peer down. Genevieve Summers, my big-tree guide, stands far below, gives me the thumbs up. I mean, it could be the thumbs up—I'm so high I can't really tell one digit from another.

Genevieve is a former chimney sweep who still favors black. She is a clear-eyed, athletic woman in her forties and one of the few certified tree-climbing teachers in the country. She's a member of, and paid instructor for, Atlanta's founding grove (or chapter) of Tree Climbers International, a club and school dedicated to promoting the sport of "technical tree climbing." Established in 1983 by an Atlanta tree surgeon and rock climber named Peter Jenkins, TCI has five groves in the United States, as well as groves in Europe, Japan, and Botswana, where the lone member climbs baobab trees. As arcane sports go, tree climbing is right up there, though each year it creeps closer to the mainstream. By the end of 1999, TCI had some 600 members, nearly double its membership of just two years earlier. Its Web site (TreeClimbing.com)—41 pages of advice, anecdotes, and boosterism—gets some 350 visitors daily. And New Tribe, the country's only manufacturer of recreational tree-climbing harnesses and saddles, arboreal hammocks, and other tree gear, doubled the size of its shop last year, hiring its first two employees. Tree climbers are taking all this equipment up California redwood, Okefenokee cypress, and Oregon Douglas fir.

Optimistically, perhaps, Jenkins calls tree climbing "America's fastest-growing vertical sport," attributing its popularity spurt to a kind of millennial techno-malaise. "TCI represents a grassroots movement away from high-priced machinery to a more simple form of exploration that adults remember from childhood," he writes on the Web site. "Our fast-paced technological society seems to keep pushing us away from the natural world. Yet there still remains that hunger for more simple forms of adventure that can bring us back to nature."

This weekend, about 30 of us are putting the moves on nature in the Kilmer Memorial Forest. The forest was established in 1935 in honor of New Jersey poet Joyce Kilmer, who was killed in World War I at the age of 32, but whose sentimental 1913 poem "Trees" ("I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree") doggedly lives on. Each year, TCI members and instructors from around the country meet here to commune with the big trees and with one another. It's not a buff and pumped-up group. Rather, it's familial: four father-daughter pairs, a father and son, a mother and son, and two married couples. Ages range from ten-year-old Patrick Livergood to 72-year-old tree-climbing marvel Wild Bill Riordan. But from my roost 90 feet up this poplar, they all look tiny, indistinguishable as marbles.

Genevieve's 19-year-old son, Silvan, is high above me in this great canopy of Rousseauesque leaves. He pulls himself onto a branch, checks his prussik knot, and lets himself down on his rope, hanging upside down like a lemur. He swings back and forth, grinning at me, and I think of what his mother said earlier: "Everything's different when you meet people in a tree."