Posted by Steed Leather gloves made it a little harder to get a solid grip. The best thing I found were worker's gloves with sticky palms, but unless you have to worry about the cold, bare hands still seem best.
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My one regret while climbing my first crane recently was that I didn't wear gloves. The metal can ge!t bitter cold, even if it's fairly pleasant temperature wise.
I psyched myself out a couple times due to the incredible heights that I'm not that used to climbing, but in reality (at least the cranes I've come across in downtown Dallas), the whole set up is pretty dang safe. The cage has flooring every 20 feet or so, so even if you did lose your footing, you'd only free fall maybe 10 or 15 feet before hitting metal flooring:
Possibly painful, but not generally very lethal. The cage is cross-barred on the sides, so it's not until you get to the very top of the thing that the rules change a bit. If you're paying attention and you're sober, you'll be fine.
Construction sites tend to vary greatly regarding security. Someone else posted earlier about security rarely going onto the higher floors, and I have to agree. Once you get past the first couple floors, even better, get past the last floor that they have rigged up the electricity (i.e., security lighting), you should be good to go. This make-shift electricity set up seems pretty standard for the phase of construction that requires a crane. Any time I've found an accessible crane, it's been from a few floors up on a construction site that was already started. For instance, on New Years Eve, we checked out a high rise going up in Dallas and it had two cranes located on either side of the structure. Both cranes are situated inside the buildings jutting out through concrete holes (more or less). The ground floor of the crane is well secured and fenced in, but from the fourth or fifth floor, I was able to climb onto the outer wall of the crane and inside the cage. This was probably the most dangerous part of my climb, since there is a sizable gap where from the actual level I was on and the crane. This required a bit of focus, but once on the crane, the rest is easy if you don't let your imagination get the best of you. Here's a couple photos of what I've been trying to describe where the crane runs through the actual building:
This is from the ground and the crane runs up the building on the lower right side of the photo:
Next time, I will certainly wear gloves though - for a much more pleasant experience overall.
Hope that helped!