What are the certified hunting/climbing sites that could be accessed to be sure it is not just some yokel demonstrating what Billy Bob showed him?
I start with the experts first and work my way to back to the learners.
People have commented on this site that they should get training before doing something new. They might as well get it from the experts, otherwise they might learn it wrong.
Who said anything about certified?
Climbing etc. is ridiculously jargon-heavy, with cryptic manuals that half the time tell you nothing, or just give a few crappy pictograms of good/bad examples. A lot of what rock climbers do isn't directly applicable to what we do. Same with a lot of what arborists do.
To be blunt: I'm watching an REI rappel video - it starts talking about threading through a rappel anchor, hooking on to your belay loop, using the personal anchor already attached to my tie-in points on my harness to make a rappel extension. Then I hook up the rappel device to my tether! at two points (and the personal anchor looks
dangerously similar to a daisy chain...obviously it's not, but I could easily see someone make a mistake there...) with a carabiner...and then grab both strands of my rope, pinch them into a bite (intentionally misspelled to make a point), wrapping a hitch around my 2 brake strands (without defining what they are)...and then to treat them "as if you were belaying". And now I'm clipping my personal anchor into the belay loop that I don't have?
That's drinking from a firehose that's telling you to use equipment that you generally won't have or want in a hunting scenario, and comparing what you need to do to something else that, if you're not coming from a climbing background, you've never done.
Best is to learn from a knowledgeable instructor. If you're going to resort to videos...start with something that has an appropriate frame of reference. If I'm not wearing a rock climbing harness, and don't have a rock climbing background - a video that tells me to hook things to connections I don't have (and don't see up in the tree either), talks about gear that I don't have (and that isn't necessarily a great choice for our application), and tells me to do tasks "like I am doing some other rock climbing task I don't know" isn't useful.
Watching that video, I'd have no idea:
- How to establish an anchor in the tree
- How to safely attach my rappel device to my saddle
- That it's important to keep the autoblock away from the rappel device
- How to retrieve my rope
I'd also have seen use of gear personal anchor) that's similar but differs in important ways from gear commonly used in saddle hunting (e.g. daisy chains) without any clear message of differentiation.
If anything start with an arborist video...but honestly starting with a saddle-hunting specific video to figure out what gear goes where and give yourself a frame of reference...and then watch rock climbing videos now that you can see through the jargon, gets you to a better space. And vet the heck out of everything.