Kyle Koch was walking around his neighborhood in northeast Seattle when he got talking to a woman at a school. She was climbing a rock wall on the side of the building, and she told him, “Yeah, it’s really hard to find walls around here.” He asked whether she had ever thought about climbing trees. She asked him whether he knew any good ones.

Koch is a former IT software technician who, by the time of this conversation, had spent close to a decade leading people through experiences in nature. When he walks around his neighborhood, he says, he sees “all of these trees and houses,” and he has a name for the way he sees them: “that parkour vision.”

So two people were standing in the same streets and finding different amounts of terrain in them. She had been looking for walls and found them hard to come by. He was seeing something to climb in the trees and the houses. The supply of terrain was not a property of the neighborhood. It was a property of the person looking at it.

Koch has watched that property change in himself. He describes catching hold of a branch with one arm, on a tree that had been out of his reach, and says of it: “I just unlocked that tree.”

“Now it’s like a jump. When you unlock a jump, a whole world of jumps opens to you. When you unlock a tree, a whole world of trees to climb, open up to you.”

One tree does not add one tree to his list. It adds trees. Having climbed one, he walks through a city that holds climbable trees in a way it did not before he caught that branch, and not one of them is new. Nothing was built for him and nothing was taken away. The world got larger from the inside, out of something he had just done. The order he gives for how that happens is noticing first, then “taking it a step further and making that first attempt.”

Some trees still defeat him. “I see all these trees that I can’t yet climb,” he says, “but that’s the motivation.” Those trees remain in view for him, as climbs he cannot make yet. For someone who has never unlocked a tree, the same tree is not a hard climb. It is not a climb at all.

The sit spot, as he describes it, starts before any category does:

“It’s just going outside and being curious, and seeing what draws your attention. And then asking more questions, ‘Oh, that tree is interesting.’ Question I might ask is, could I climb it? And if I can climb it, will I climb it?”

Looking for walls can only ever turn up walls. The sit spot starts from the other end: attention first, and only afterward the question of whether the particular thing that caught it is something you could climb. “Could I climb it?” asks what your history has unlocked. “Will I climb it?” is a separate question, about whether you want to on a given day, and it keeps a larger world from turning into a longer list of obligations.

Somewhere on your own route there is probably a ledge, a bank or a low branch that has never once been terrain for you. It is not hidden. It sits outside what you have already done, and so far that has been enough to keep it out of view.

This field note references the Movers Mindset episode “Kyle Koch: Training, nature, and tracking,” published March 3, 2021.

This work was produced using AI language models directed through an editorial system designed by Craig Constantine. The author selected all source material, designed the creative framework, directed the editorial process, and made all acceptance and revision decisions. The prose was generated by AI under sustained human editorial direction.