Park Ranger magazine is the newest edition to the TR Media Ltd family. Park Ranger magazine will be based on the successful format of Technical Rescue Magazine, subscribed to by rescue professionals in over 60 countries that are seeking to stay current in their field.
No other profession expects so much from its workers. Unlike the police officer, firefighter, urban EMS specialist, or urban SAR responder where backup or support is minutes away, rangers and wilderness operatives commonly find themselves in remote settings with broken communication channels, where backup or support is measured in hours or even days and weeks in the case of Antarctic bases. Park Ranger magazine offering cutting edge peer reviewed articles, honest product reviews and the quality photography that set TR Media's magazines apart from our competition.
Technical Rescue magazine came about accidentally when we, as members of the Technical Rescue Unit (a fire service coordinated team and the the first such unit in the UK) were looking for equipment. We were generally unimpressed with the quality of the magazines available at that time and thought we could do a better job. And so, a part-time publishing job was created in between full time rescue operations. A common theme for virtually all of the senior members of the Technical Rescue Unit was a background in arboriculture or tree surgery as it was called then. Indeed, so relevant were arborists skills to our work on the Technical Rescue Unit that we actively recruited firefighters who had been (or in some cases , still were) tree surgeons and it's no surprise that the skills involved in working on rope, on inherantly unstable structures whilst using a chainsaw made for some of the best technical rescue personnel.
In the early to mid nineties we started noticing that gear made by 'rescue' manufacturers which we thought was intended for us in rescue was actually intended for arborists. When Treemagineers, a cohort of some seriously talented tree climbers started working with DMM and Teufelberger we really started to get confused as the hardware, webbing gear and even ropes specifically made for arborists looked better than ours in rescue. but lots of it was still just as applicable to rescue as it was to trees and this is not surprising since rescue of arborists, kids and cats from trees has been a mainstay of annual calls for decades. With an increasing USAR (disaster Response) requirement and emergency storm work requiring some deft chainsaw skills and an ability to work in the kind of weather that no sensible arborist would ever work in we never strayed too far from tree work and some of us never actually left the commercial arb world at all.
So, we have, for the past few years been toying with a way to include arboriculture in Technical Rescue magazine beyond aerial rescue because there was so much crossover. But that crossover was centred on rope work and chainsaws only. With water rescue and Extrication being largely unrelated we felt that a large proportion of readers might wonder about the relevance. It was the arb supplies catalogues of Sherrill Tree in the US, Fletcher Stewart (Steins) in the UK and Treetools website from New Zealand that finally convinced us that it was time for a dedicated magazine. And so with lots of material already on our system Arb Climber was born. It was to going to be be 'Tree Climber' but the website was already taken by a tree climbing frame company and 'tree climbing' as a term is often used for the recreational side of tree climbing.
Our philosophy in both magazines is to write in a style and with content that we as rescuers or in this case arborists would want to read rather than what a publishing house thinks we should be reading. We're all about equipment and techniques in an informal though technical and peer reviewed style. Please feel free to email us if you've got any comments, tips, ideas for articles, photos etc - this really is a magazine for the workers of the tree world. Ade Scott