Entry is available across four grades: Student Grade is for both male and female climbers who have not competed before and are currently enrolled in an arboricultural training course; female competitors are asked to enrol in the Women’s Grade; and the majority of male climbers will be taking part in the Men’s Open Grade.  Only climbers with previous competition experience will be able to compete in the Men’s Masters Grade, which has a limited number of places available.  Qualification for this grade will be based primarily on ranking in previous VTCCs, then on ranking in other ISA-format competitions.  

International and interstate climbers are very welcome to take part, and although only Victorian climbers will be eligible to take part in the Master’s Challenge, out-of-state competitors will in all other respects compete on a level footing with local climbers: you will be able to win events and take home prizes! 

To register please use the form provided here

Details are still to be finalised, but we hope to be working with several leading speakers to cover a range of topics related to visual tree assesment, identifying structural weak points and discussing targets, as well as offering a guided ‘walk and talk’ around some of the interesting trees in the gardens.  Further information will be posted here as soon as it becomes available.

Registration is available using the form given here.

The dates for the Victorian Tree Climbing Competition have also been pencilled in – we hope to run the competition across the weekend of October 23rd/24th, with the venue tentatively confirmed as Warragul.  Further details and entry forms will be given here as they become available.

The VTIO would also like to invite members and interested parties to a meeting of the VTIO committee, to discuss the draft Climbing Guidelines. The meeting will start at 6:00pm on Tuesday 10th August, and will be held in the Arboriculture classroom of NMIT.  Please contact one of the committee if you wish to attend and require further details.

The guidelines have now been available for download from the site for approximately six months, and have previously been mailed out to all members.  We are grateful for all of the feedback and comment that has been received, and the points raised will be discussed at the meeting, as we aim to get the document out of the draft stage.  After the meeting, a revised and updated version will be sent out to all members for your further comment.

In better news, the first revisions of the popular handouts from the recent workshop are now up online.

The PDF on Single Rope Technique now features the RAD system (pictured to the right).

Introduction to Redirects has been updated to include Tom Oldmeadow’s In-Line Retrievable Redirect (see below.)

Perhaps the biggest revision has been to Working the Angles, which has been updated with a new appendix showing graphs of the various relationships described in the text: much easier to work with on a job site than a complicated equation!

The VTIO would also like to announce that the next workshop in this series will be on Visual Tree Assessment. Date and details are still to be finalised, but keep watching this space!