Chipping away at success: Australian tree-climbing champion competes in US

He’s not a household name, but in the sport of tree climbing, Australia’s Barton Allen-Hall has reached dizzying global heights.

Not content to work as a successful arborist in the Dandenong Ranges, in Melbourne’s outer east, Allen-Hall branched out to practise tree climbing as a sport.

In the last decade, he has climbed world rankings and won the last two world titles.

Allen-Hall will seek to once more (figuratively) carve up the opposition, a field of 90 elite athletes, at the 2024 International Tree Climbing Championship starting on Thursday in the US.

Despite having won the ‘worlds’ in 2022 in Copenhagen and in 2023 in Albuquerque, and being a seven-time and reigning 2024 Australian champion, he’s far from cocky about winning.

“I’m going to try. You never know how things will pan out. I’m definitely going to give it a red-hot crack.”

The setting this time is the US city of Savannah, Georgia, famous for its graceful live oaks.

(Savannah was the setting of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, John Berendt’s famous novel, based on a real murder and the eccentric residents Berendt met.)

At the international tree climbing championship, on from October 24 to 27, there will be no chainsawing or hand-sawing of the evergreen oaks at Savannah’s Daffin Park.

Competitors are judged in heats on skills such as rope throwing and climbing, branch ascent and rescuing a mannequin.

The entrants with the five highest scores compete in a Masters Challenge – a combined skills test that decides the winner.

Allen-Hall’s Savannah trip has been paid for by sponsors such as outdoor power-tools company Husqvarna.

Allen-Hall is among six Australians competing, including friend Jack Lewis, also from Melbourne.

Apart from getting to hang out with fellow tree enthusiasts, Allen-Hall loves “the challenge of it and the adrenaline of testing your skills against the best in the world and seeing how they stack up”.

Allen–Hall, who was born in Sydney, started climbing trees as a boy. He grew up in Lightning Ridge in outback NSW and in Canberra and now lives in Upwey, east of Melbourne.

He says as an arborist he is “never out of work” and climbing is essential because machines still can’t do all the work.

Often there is no room around a tree to park a cherry-picker, and while the latter can be “great at accessing the very tips of a tree” branches can block their access to foliage deeper within the tree.

He says tree climbing “keeps you fit and you know you’re alive when you’re working hard”.

“Some days you’re out in the rain and freezing cold but it makes you appreciate coming home to a warm house. It’s a great job, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.”

He says the skills and art of tree climbing are “endlessly stimulating”.

“I find it really enjoyable all the different challenges it presents, moving around the tree, different techniques and strategies, different rope techniques.”

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