Four-year-old boy takes dare to climb tree, gets stuck 50 feet off the ground

It must have been a double-dog dare.

Four-year-old Parker Clark took his older brother's challenge to scale a tree very seriously, shimmying about 50 feet up before realizing he was too scared to try and climb back down.

"I told him to come down, realized that wouldn't work and the neighbor couldn't get up there, so I called 911," Parker's grandmother, Barbara Dawsey, told the Dothan Eagle. "The fire department couldn't get to him, so we called the tree people."

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Sign up

A photo from the scene that the Alabama newspaper ran with the story shows Parker clinging to a limb, so high up he's almost invisible (play "Where's Parker" and try to spot him, on a branch leaning out to the left, about three-quarters of the way up the photograph).

It took the local tree service about two hours to get Parker down, but besides a bit of crying early on, the boy handled his predicament pretty well.

"He ain't afraid of much," Parker's grandfather, Royce Dawsey said.