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What makes a good first tree

Low branches, thick bark, nothing dead underfoot. A tree tagged “good first tree” on the map has already been vouched for by someone who’s been up it. Please be safe when starting out, a risk is never worth it! ♥

Not hurting yourself

The basics: three points of contact, (almost) always! Two hands and a foot, or two feet and a hand, moving one at a time. The fourth is what’s still holding you if the others slip. Can’t understate how much difference this makes, just through keeping enough points of contact and moving with attention, you are genuinely safe even with a daunting abyss below you.

Test a limb before you trust it with your weight. Push down on it first, from below, before you commit. You can often tell what wood is dead based on whether leaves are growing on a branch, but not always!

It helps to climb down the way you climbed up. Safes you a moment of panic not knowing how to get down ♥ Also, be careful with jumping the last bit! That last moment of losing focus is how I have bruised a couple ankles…

Kodamap doesn't have a safety inspection. Check a tree for yourself before you trust it!

Take your shoes off

Climbing barefoot is very very worth it!! You feel the tree through your soles, the grip is better, and something old in you wakes up, and before you know it, you have intuitive insights coming in about which branches will hold you and where exactly your toes should be placed on that weirdly formed piece of bark…

Standing on a branch on the balls of your feet is also such a powerful feeling! Try it once and you’ll stop wanting boots.

Build it up oh so slowly

There’s no hurry at all~. Spend time in and around trees just to get a feel for them, before you have any plan about getting to the top of one.

Your monkey senses awaken gradually. At some point you notice the subtle feeling that you’re completely safe in a big tree, and that you can tell which branch will hold you and which one won’t, by touch, before you’ve thought about it. That’s the thing worth waiting for.

Your skin is building up something too, not just your senses. Just from being up in those trees, over the weeks your palms and soles of your feet build up callous, giving you serious upgrades in grip! Embrace it, you’ll soon feel you’ll never need gloves again~

Hands and feet, not the whole body

I haven’t heard many others say this, but I like to work with my hands and feet as much as I can. Wrapping your arms and legs around the trunk is usually not necessary, and it earns you nasty scratches and torn clothes. And it’s sooo fun to be warping and fold your body in many ways to move with as little friction as you can, avoiding all those sticking out little branches! Makes me feel like a ninja to be moving all ‘stealth mode’ like that~

It’s also friction on the tree, which the tree could do without. Two hands and two feet is plenty. Think of yourself as a groovy frog with its four suction cups as feet: your limbs and your middle have a lot of mobility from there!

About strength and flexiblity

You do need some strength for this, I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But it’s probably not the strength you are picturing. What actually carries you up a tree is whole-body strength and a steady core, the kind that keeps you balanced and calm while you work out where the next foot is going.

I found that leg flexibility is the real superpower. So much of climbing is about getting a foot up somewhere awkwardly high and then standing on it (and the reverse on the way back). Grow yourself some loose legs, it only takes a little stretching here and there! …Or just allow them to be stretched by moving through many trees in quirky ways~

And contrary to what the guy in the first video says: I really don’t think you need to be able to do pull ups. I can’t really do them either! With a bit of handiness you can still get up pretty difficult trees just by hanging and walking your feet up the trunk, and there are so many other manoeuvres you can use if you put your mind to it. Don’t let a pull up bar decide whether you get to climb ♥

One personal comment, because the videos below mostly show guys doing gymnastic-y things: this is not a boy’s sport! Climbing calls on real strength, yes, but just as much on patience, balance, and a kind of softness that has nothing to do with being strong, more a willingness to listen to the tree instead of forcing your way through it. Both halves matter, and neither one belongs to any particular kind of person. However you move through the world, there is a way up this tree that is yours. Hurray to all the more feminine tree elves and their beautiful strange flows up the world’s trees! ☺️

Be a tree elf

When you get up there: have a pause! Sit down on your branch of choice, and stay a while. Enjoy the view, listen to what the Forest is doing, smell it (trees smell completely different from up there!), feel the bark under your feet, feel how the wind is swaying the branch you’re sitting on… Breathe deeply and let yourself be somewhere very few people ever go.

This is not only the nicest part, it is also the safest part. Going slowly, taking it all in, resting whenever you want to rest: that is a person making good decisions in a tree. Treating it as a sport that is about technique and speed, getting up and coming straight back down again, is both less fun and less safe. (Of course this is different when you’re climbing with a rope, but that’s not the style of the Tree Elf 😁)

I’d also warmly recommend to climb trees on your own, rather than ‘with someone’: this way you really don’t have anyone to prove something to, and you’ll also feel even more of the love and acceptance that the tree you’re engaging has to offer!

I really think climbing a tree is something spiritual. It is a connection to the Tree that a very deep instinct unlocks in you, not a ladder of skills to tick off. (Yes, somewhere out at the Tarzan end of things there is a beautiful kind of monkey flow waiting, and I am sure it feels indescribable. But please do not make that the goal! Enjoy what you can already do, today, in this tree 💕)

Not hurting the tree

Bark scars where boots scrape it, branches break where they’re not ready to hold weight yet, and a tree in nesting season has other things going on than you. None of this is a rule, it’s just paying attention to something that’s alive.

People who teach this properly

This page is just meant as a nice starting point. If you want real instruction, look for tree climbing and movement or parkour coaches near you. The technique carries over more than you’d expect!