The Perils of Hunting on High

When he felt his boot filling up with blood, Wilmer Karn knew he was in a bad way. Moments earlier, Karn had been scaling a tree up near Wolfsville in Frederick County to get in position for the first day of deer hunting in the firearm season. The lifelong hunter wouldn't get off a single shot.

"Well, I was going up in my stand, and I got to the top. And when I get to the top, I always grab a hold and swing right in there," said Karn, 59, a retired plumber from Hagerstown, Md. "But I lost my grip and down I went."

Karn plummeted 15 feet to the forest floor, knocked the wind out of himself, shattered his right ankle in three places, broke his fibula and popped his tibia out through the skin.

"My foot was just hanging there, it had just broke the bone completely off," he said. "When I hit the ground, I pretty much knew it was shot. It was terrible -- there's just no other word for it."

Common would be another one. Far more common, in fact, than hunters shooting themselves or their buddies, or any other firearm-related mishap. On the day of Karn's fall, Nov. 26, two other hunters in Maryland -- one in Montgomery County, the other in Kent County on the Eastern Shore -- plunged out of tree stands, one to his death.

Of the 10 hunting accidents in Maryland in the past six months, six have involved people falling out of trees. And over the last five years, more than half of all hunting accidents in the state, 65 out of 126 accidents through Dec. 15, were falls from tree stands, Maryland Natural Resources Police said. The rate is lower in Virginia, but tree stand falls are a consistent problem there, too.

Gravity, it turns out, is a worthy adversary.

"You're sitting up in the tree stand, you either doze off or stand up to stretch your legs and lose your balance," said Natural Resources Police Sgt. Ken Turner. "It's a human error. We're not squirrels."

Tree stands, which have become increasingly popular over the past decade as the technology improves, come in several varieties. Some are portable climbing devices, made of aluminum or steel, which hunters use to inchworm themselves up the trunk. Others are permanent platforms, or wooden treehouse-type structures, that both bow and gun hunters return to year after year. The elevation keeps the hunter's scent away from deer, and, as Allan Ellis, promotions manager at Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World at Arundel Mills mall in Hanover, put it, "Deer don't have a tendency to look up."

"It's a great ambush site, but as popularity grows, of course the accidents grow," he said. The DNR held a tree stand safety seminar at his store last weekend.

Back a few decades, early tree stands typically were eight to 10 feet off the ground, Ellis said, so "when you fell out, you'd break a fingernail. Now we've got guys climbing 30 to 35 feet up in a tree. When you come down, you don't bounce that well."

The results can be fatal. The day of Karn's fall, Andre Strickland, 53, was hunting in Seneca Creek State Park off River Road in Montgomery County. When repeated calls to his cell phone were unanswered, a search party was sent into the dark woods, Turner said. About midnight, Strickland's body was found dangling from a tree.