I still use ladders, more than I want to. I usually find a way to secure them pretty solidly like strapping a stepladder down to my large flat trailer. The only way the ladder was going over was if trailer and all did. A couple thousand pounds of trailer and I felt pretty secure.
I have a limb in the front yard as a reminder not to trim trees from a ladder, not large limbs anyway. Lot's of youtube video to show this isn't a bright move but the limb in the front yard is a fine illustration too. It is a long limb and broke near the crotch, right where someone would be trimming it from a ladder. It is an eight or ten inch limb, maybe twenty to twenty five feet long, and every bit of it is on the opposite side of the tree trunk from the side the limb was on. The end of the limb hit ground before the big end at the crotch broke free and then despite being dead springboarded the entire limb twenty feet or so. Had a climber or ladder been in the way . . . .
I had just turned eighteen and gotten a job hanging insulation and sheet metal in a petro-chem plant. I was out on a permit and union construction pay was nine and a nickel an hour, I was in tall cotton! There was a pipe rack sixty feet in the air and an old wooden extension ladder to get up into the rack. It was angled up pretty steeply to reach and had a lot of movement to it the first time I went up. I wired the top very solidly to the steel I-beam it was leaning against and went on about my business. I headed up the ladder a little too fast a couple times and had to stop climbing and hang on for dear life about the time I got midway. The ladder started flexing back and forth and was moving six feet or more total. Few fair rides offered such a thrill!
I was proceeding up the ladder rather cautiously after eating lunch one day. I had a few things in one hand and you needed two hands when that ladder went to bucking. My foreman saw me and told me to get on up the ladder, added a few frills and flourishes to his instructions! I didn't say a thing. Next day he was trying to holler up from the ground to tell me something but I couldn't hear him. Not being the patient sort he sailed up the ladder. It did the rodeo horse thing with him about halfway up and he locked on until the ladder settled down, completely down dead still. When he climbed up to me I just looked at him and commented, "it gets a little whippy about halfway up or a little more if you get in too big of a hurry." I didn't get any more foolishness about taking too long going up the ladder after that. The wooden ladders were outlawed not too long afterwards. The aluminum and fiberglass ones could get a little interesting but they never compared to that old worn out wooden ladder. I heard that some of the old wooden extension ladders were as long as 120 feet. I think if I had to climb one of them and it even halfway compared to the ride that the sixty footer gave me I would have drawn my time.