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Better Safe(r) Than Sorry
By Kenneth Piper
Having suffered a treestand fall as well as experiencing several other close calls, safety is one of my hot buttons. Call me paranoid, but I keep an extra old safety harness in my truck at all times. As a side note, if you do something like that, be sure to check it once per year to make sure nothing has dry-rotted or rusted that would make the harness unsafe.
I will not hunt from an elevated stand without a harness (and please don’t do it yourself), but there are times when it’s difficult to get situated properly with your safety gear. One example is a tree that is so big you can’t get your attachment rope around it. I ran into that just two weeks ago hunting with an outfitter in Illinois.
Interestingly, that outfitter’s insurance company told him not to install Life Lines on his stands because if he did so and something went wrong, then he would be vulnerable to a lawsuit. I can’t see how the outfitter trying to make a hunter safe is a bad thing, but I don’t blame him for listening to his lawyer’s advice.
Fortunately for me, I’ve run into that situation before, and I am prepared to deal with it.
At this point I should cover my own liability and say this method is not the preferred way to anchor your tether rope, and it should only be used when all other standard methods are unworkable. Consider it an emergency contingency plan that is far less safe than wrapping your tether rope completely around the tree (or a very thick branch coming out of the main trunk of the tree).
What I do in these situations is use an extremely sturdy T-screw to anchor my tether rope. I’m not talking about a screw-in hook you buy at Walmart or Home Depot. I got my heavy duty T-screws from Cranford Manufacturing, but I don’t believe they offer them any longer. Instead, I recommend using a screw-in tree step (Cranford does make excellent screw-in tree steps, as does Ameristep).
Keep one in your pack at all times for emergencies such as this. If you run into a situation where you simply can’t wrap your tether rope around the tree or a hefty branch, screw the step deeply into the tree and use it to anchor your tether rope.
You also must be sure the rope will not pull off the step under force, which means you should finish the rotation with the step in an upward position. In other words, the horizontal step part should be above the screw hole instead of below as would be normal for using it as a tree step. Also, you would not hang the tether from the horizontal part of the step since that would pull off easily. Instead, wrap it around the part of the step that runs parallel to the tree directly out of the screw-in hole. Done properly, the step should actually pinch your tether rope against the tree as you screw it in.
Here’s a bonus tip: When carrying screw-in steps or accessory hangers, cut a short length of flexible plastic tubing and place it over the point of the screw. Doing so will save your pack from poke holes. Home improvement stores offer such tubing in various diameters for just a few bucks. One foot of tubing will allow you to cover multiple screws.
The reason it’s so important to use a robust anchor is the extreme amount of force that happens during a fall. For example, with my weight, if I were to fall just 3 feet (which is about how far I fell when I injured my hand when I didn’t have the tether cinched up properly), the impact to the rope and harness would be about 1,680 pound-force. That’s not something you can trust to an accessory hanger or bow hanger.
That’s also why I’ll stress again that this anchor method is not recommended for standard use. The right call is such situations is probably to get down and not use the stand, but that’s not an easy choice when you’ve paid thousands of dollars to hunt just a few days. If you are going to hunt out of such a setup anyway, be as safe as you can possibly be and use a sturdy anchor.