My Childhood Treehouse Fort:

Between teaching myself freestyle bike tricks in the neighborhood on my Schwinn Predator and playing kickball, my biggest childhood hobby was building trails in the woods behind my house. The woods fostered some intricate trails that had intersections, jumps, bank turns, the like!

I built some lean-to’s, shoddy forts, and camping areas. Nothing to write home about.

One of the trails had two birch trees on the left side and one on the right. My treehouse first started out as a platform using the 3 trees as footers. I rode my bike under the platform. No purpose. I decided to encase the platform from the ground up, like a garage for my bike. I lashed logs together to make for a more medieval look. Gathering all those damn logs was a total pain in the ass.

The platform had a urinal. I cut the bottom off a 1 gal milk jug, fastened a 3.5’ hose to the mouth, and nailed the puppy to a tree. The 4’-off-the-ground hose would dangle and urine would spray all over when I’d pee into the jug. Again, pointless, but totally cool.

The Drawbridge: Hinges were fastened to a base board that was spiked into the dirt. I used scary-looking railroad spikes. The hinges were nailed to a pallet which had a boardwalk nailed to the inside/top of the bridge. When the bridge was down, the beginning edge rested in a mound of dirt, like a ramp, for me to smoothly ride bike up and on to it. When closed, the drawbridge latched using those gate ratchets that are commonly used for pool gates. On pool fences, one would pull the top of the ratchet (fastened to the fence) and a bar is forced out of its latch position. The bar is screwed to the gate. In order to close the gate again, you can just slam the door shut, and the ratchet grabs the bar. So my bar was nailed to the bridge and the ratchet/clip portion was nailed sideways to the base of the platform. Dig? Now for the kickass part. Twine was tied to the top of the ratchet mechanism. The twine was fed through an old garden hose that ran from the treehouse, underground (about 2”), and up the trail about 18 yards. The twine was tied off to the bottom of a lever. The hinge of the lever was at ground level and the top of the lever was shaped like and used as a paddle. As the teenager rode by the paddle on his/her bike, s/he could merely lower his foot, knock the paddle back thus pulling the twine and releasing the ratchet, ride up to an already-opened drawbridge, cruise inside, throw the kickstand down, and pull the pull-cord used to close the drawbridge behind him/her. So sweet!

I started digging a moat around the treehouse. Pff! I gave up after 3 hours. Upstate New York and its abundance of trees is NOT conducive to digging. So yeah, the bridge went over nothing.


This Treehouse rocks!