85% of the article was good in a generic sort of way, the reporter was a bit churlish with me, wasn't happy when I wasn't able to interview on short notice, went to press without talking to me. The opening sentence was totally weird, focusing on \"apparently illicit\" tree climbing. And the part about me removing references to a climb location from one of my photos, the reasons for doing that had nothing to do with the reporter contacting me. Oh well, the press giveth and the press taketh away. I'm trying to decide whether or not to roll with my new outlaw persona. Naw, I'm not into public image maintenance, those who know me well know that I'm in it for the love of tree climbing and seeing how happy it makes people when they climb a tree on rope for the first time.
Here's an explanation of what the
BARC site
is all about (the Gazette article did not cover this):
A couple of years ago the Boston Globe featured me in a general story on recreational tree climbing. Since then I've built up a long list of people who've emailed asking to climb. I still receive a couple emails a week from this article. I have a day job and am not a professional instructor so I've only been able to bring a small number of these people into trees. I don't own property with trees, land is very expensive in eastern Massachusetts. I climb on private property with permission and make personal climbs on public land in a low profile and environmentally sensitive way. As a result of the shortage of facilitating sites there is no go-to location to run climbs for groups. In the background I've been working on opening up climb locations in Boston parks, this is a gradual process that involves collaborating with community groups and the Boston Parks and Recreation Department. In order to give the many people who want to climb a chance to get into a tree I started the BARC community web site. I was hoping that experienced tree climbers would be able to network with new climbers, giving the new climbers the opportunity to get into some trees. I hoped this would remove the bottleneck of having all new climbers in my area go through me. Now we have a good number of experienced and potential climbers registered on the BARC site but not much is happening. The underlying problem is that we still don't have designated climbing locations in the Boston area. This will take some time and background work. In retrospect I probably should've held off from setting up the BARC site until some climbing locations were secured. It's all a learning process, we'll get there.
-moss
