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

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.

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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.

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Sarah Eberspacher is an associate editor at TheWeek.com. She has previously worked as a sports reporter at The Livingston County Daily Press & Argus and The Arizona Republic. She graduated from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.