Whether you are climbing for work or fun, your knowledge and skillset is super important to keep you safe, secure and to help get the most out of your adventure. Keeping your training current is a really important way of keeping your skillset current and we at Wild Tree Adventures ensure that we keep our ‘toolkit’ up to date and ‘well-oiled’!

Part of this involves regular complex rescue training scenarios with ‘rigging for rescue’, if you like it is thinking ahead for the all important question ‘how do I get down again’ under my own steam, and just in case, ‘what if someone needs come rescue me?!’

So I was excited to return to Stourhead NT to take part in amazingly hi-tech and great fun rescue training run by  Canopy Access Ltd (CAL) as part of their Advanced Canopy Access Proficiency. Sure it was demanding, wouldn’t want it any other way, and it was also heaps of fun, I learnt loads and I have now have some really inspiring new friends for life!

We were put through our paces, given tough scenarios and situations to deal with, egged some really great tech stuff like floating anchors, hi-lines and rescue reeves to enable us to rescue a ‘casualty’ from any point in the canopy or forest floor. It was also a little wild up there with a full on hail storm and a tad wintery weather – all good as it all added to the drama, fun times!

CAL‘s Chief Instructor is the ever amazing and fabulously humble adventurer Waldo Etherington and his skills and knowledge helped us go way beyond our ‘ceilings’ and into exciting new territory to enable us to carry out our work more efficiently and safely. Waldo climbs trees, and vast rock faces, all round the world, and what he doesn’t know about ropes and trees ain’t worth knowing! The courses are in stunning locations too, and I highly recommend booking yourself on one soon!