Friday, November 12, 2004
When hunting from a treestand ...
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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This is what Barry Arrington loved.
It was late October, the cool bite in the air signalling the start of the annual whitetail breeding season, when normally invisible trophy bucks ever-so-briefly lose caution.
On this evening, Oct.30, 1994, the avid bowhunter was more intent on preparing for the exciting action of the next few weeks than in actually hunting. He headed out to a potential hot spot to hang a tree stand.
It didn't take Arrington long to get the stand in the tree. After all, he'd done it hundreds of times before. He unhooked his safety belt and started climbing to the ground. Then he decided that he should probably get on the stand and check his shooting lanes to see if he needed to trim any brush or branches.
When Arrington stepped on the platform he also bounced a couple of times, just to make sure the stand was stable.
It wasn't.
The stand broke and Arrington fell 12 feet to the ground. During the fall his foot hit one of the steps he'd screwed into the tree, flipping Arrington over.
"I landed on my head," recalled Arrington, who is now 43.
He wasn't in pain.
"My body felt kind of tingly all over," he remembered. "I figured I'd just lie there for a couple minutes and then get up and get going.
"Pretty soon I realized I wasn't going anywhere."
Arrington will never climb another tree. He is paralyzed from chest down, with limited use of his arms. He can't move his fingers.
In an instant, Arrington had become a not-so-pleasant statistic, one of the roughly 15 Virginia hunters each year who are seriously injured in treestand-related accidents.
In all but one of the past nine years, at least one hunter in Virginia has been killed in a treestand accident.
Treestand safety statistics, which have been compiled in Virginia only since 1993, are improving.
Even as more and more hunters choose to hunt from elevated stands, accident numbers are declining.
In five of the past six seasons, the total number of reported accidents has fallen below the average of the past 11 years.
There were just 11 accidents last season, and only nine in 2002.
So far this season there has been just a single reported treestand accident in Virginia, with the hunter receiving minor injuries.
One hunter was killed in each of the past two seasons.
The average number of accidents over the past five years has been 12.6, a 25 percent drop from the average of 16.8 over the previous five years.
Firearms-related hunting accidents have declined a similar amount during the same time period.
The improvement is not enough to satisfy Arrington.
He is an outspoken advocate of treestand safety, spreading a message of caution he hopes will help others avoid accidents he believes are preventable.
"Don't think it can't happen to you," he tells hunters.
Arrington was still in his hospital bed when he got started. Friend Steve Pike, a Virginia game warden then working in Bedford County, asked Arrington if he would be willing to do an interview with a TV news crew.
Arrington agreed.
"It worked," Arrington said. "I heard that Wal-Mart sold out of safety harnesses in just a few days."
Indeed, the year Arrington was injured there were only 13 treestand-related accidents, a drop from the previous year and the fourth-lowest total since statistics have been compiled.
Yet accident numbers were up again in the following years, peaking at 22 in 1997. A high of three hunters were killed in 1999.
Treestand safety has become a stressed part of the curriculum in Virginia's hunter education classes, a requirement for young and new hunters.
Arrington, who remains a dedicated hunter despite his disability, volunteered to appear in a treestand safety video produced by the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. He often personally delivers his safety message to classes.
Arrington said he thinks the message hits the hunters hard when they see him in his wheelchair.
"I have a pretty good feeling they never go out without a safety harness," he said.
Virginia game warden lieutenant Scott Reynolds, who oversees the hunter education program, says program leaders are constantly looking to improve their safety message.
"We constantly try to tweak the curriculum," Reynolds said.
For example, instructors have recently begun emphasizing the importance of wearing a full-body harness instead of just a belt.
"If you fall with a single safety strap and are suspended from that," Reynolds said, "it restricts you and you have just a few moments to recover before you may lose consciousness."
Furthermore, Reynolds said, hunters need to know that the primary function of a harness is not to catch a falling hunter, but to keep a hunter from falling. Therefore the line from the harness to the tree should have only minimal slack.
Also, because many falls occur while hunters are climbing into or out of their stands, hunters should be strapped in at all times.
"Use a harness from the moment your feet leave the ground until the moment they're back on the ground," Reynolds said.
Hunters also need to make sure someone knows where they will be, a potentially life-saving precaution.
Arrington knows.
"Before I went out I did something I never did, and poked my head in and told my dad where I was going," he said. " So I knew they'd find me.
"I knew I wasn't going to die."
Those thoughts, while providing some measure of comfort to Arrington at the time, are thoughts he wishes no other hunter ever has to think.treestand safety, spreading a message of caution he hopes will help others avoid accidents he believes are preventable.
