Some of the top tree climbers from the U.S. and Canada descended on the Davey Tree SEED Campus on Friday, May 15, for a weekend of fellowship and rivalry at the International Society of Arboriculture North American Tree Climbing Championship.
This is the first year since its inception 15 years ago that the North American Tree Climbing Championship has been held on private property; it typically takes place at public parks.
“As a Davey employee, it’s really exciting in the sense that this is an amazing facility that Davey has created to invest in the development of its employees and we’re able to share it with our industry,” said Davey Tree Vice President of Health and Safety Operations Support Don Roppolo. “Bringing folks in here and having a facility that we can host an event like this is really pretty special. It’s an honor and really pretty humbling to have all these folks here and taking advantage of the facility.”
The North American Tree Climbing Championship at the Davey Tree SEED Campus on a rainy Saturday. Jeremy Brown/The Portager
The Davey Tree SEED Campus focus is on training employees, educating arborists and improving the industry of arboriculture as a whole, so holding the ISA Tree Climbing Championship at the facility perfectly fits into its directive. The championship is just as much about learning and education as it is about competition.
“The goal of these competitions is really for our arborists to see best practices in the industry: that’s safety, newest equipment and learning from the veterans,” ISA Director of Marketing and Communications Alice Bagley said. “The goal of this is always about safety, so to be able to do it at Davey SEED Campus, it was beautiful, a state-of-the-art training facility. It’s where they train all of their employees, so for them to open it up for all of the arborists from all over North America was incredible. It was incredibly generous, and it was met with a lot of excitement in the industry, because people have wanted to see this campus. We loved it there. For arborists, it’s like the creme de la creme to be able to come see that.”
Bagley said holding the championship at the SEED campus was much easier to plan, because events on private property don’t require municipal permits, a step that ISA has had to take in the past when holding the event at public parks.
This year's North American Championship was planned in coordination between ISA, Davey Tree and over 100 volunteers. It was the largest championship to date with 79 climbers.
Not just any tree climber can enter the event. Each contestant has to compete on a local level and be nominated by their local chapter to be eligible for registration at the North American Championship.
The championship included five preliminary events that took place on Friday and Saturday. The top scorers from those events moved on to the masters’ challenge, which was held on Sunday.
Four of the preliminary events simulate the climbing tasks that tree climbers use in their daily jobs. That’s the throwline event, the ascent event, the belayed speed climb event and the work climb event. The fifth preliminary event, the aerial rescue, is rarely used by climbers, but it’s included because climbers are required to know how to execute the task in case of emergencies.
The throwline event simulates the first step a climber uses to get into a tree: throwing a line into the tree so they can climb up. A weighted pouch is tied to the end of the rope to help give the rope momentum, enabling climbers to accurately hit their target between branch unions in the canopy, which can sometimes be more than 60 feet high. Climbers are scored on their accuracy and ability to get the rope into the tree.
Once the rope’s in the tree, the climber needs to ascend. There are two events that focus on that: the ascent event and the belayed speed climb event. Both are referred to as speed events and are judged on how fast a climber can get up into the tree.
The ascent event is typically done in a larger tree that doesn’t have a lot of lower branches, and the climber is required to climb straight up a rope and ring a bell that is placed at a point where a limb would normally need to be cut in a real-life scenario. In contrast, the belayed speed climb event is done in a tree with lots of lower branches, where the climber is required to tie off and belay through the limbs to reach the upper regions of the tree and ring the bell.
The ascent event also included a head-to-head ascent event, where two climbers raced to the top of the SEED campus' indoor metal climbing tower, located in its 10,700-foot climbing arena.
“In competition, we’re not pruning off limbs; we’re ringing a bell. You have to get yourself in a safe, comfortable position to make that imaginary cut, and then you move on to another position,” Roppolo said. “That event assesses a climber's ability to safely move around a tree, and how confident they are in those positions. One of the stations in that is called the stick toss. We’ve cut a branch; now we need to throw it down to a safe spot on the ground. If we’re working in a backyard and there’s a pool under us, we’re not going to drop the limb into the pool. We need to toss it to the side, and there’s a target on the ground that they need to hit with the sticks that are there.”
The final event, the aerial rescue, is a simulation of a rescue of a fellow climber who may be suffering from heat exhaustion or an injury. A mannequin is placed in a tree and a preset scenario is assigned. The climber is required to assess what is wrong with the evacuee and decide what they would need to do to get the evacuee down from the tree.
“The aerial rescue is the most interesting to me,” Roppolo said. “Each climber is going to go about that differently, versus the other events that are effectively the same. They solve that problem of how do I manage this injury, how do I get this person down to the ground and get them the care that they need; it’s pretty neat to see that creativity, watching people solve that problem, and everybody comes up with their own solution."
The championship took place during a gamut of weather conditions, with some chilly dips into the 40s to 90 degrees and sunny on Sunday. On Saturday, lightning and rain stopped the event for a couple of hours, but climbers were back out in the trees by early afternoon, scaling wet branches. Roppolo said when branches are wet, climbers have to take more precautions and use more calculated movements; they move slower to keep from slipping, which puts them at a disadvantage.
The fastest event times aren’t what’s on most climbers’ minds. It’s the camaraderie among colleagues and the chance to learn from each other that is most important, a detail Roppolo and Bagley agree on.
“The competitors are each other's fans, and what I love about this competition is, even though they’re competing, and they do get some really lovely prizes from our sponsors, but they really do compete for the love of the sport, and they really encourage each other, and they coach each other,” Bagley said. “It’s so funny to me that someone will come out of a tree and the next person going up is literally their competitor and they’ll tell them what to do. I think that just really embodies the spirit of the competition and what it was really created for, which was to help teach and support each other and to show best practices. And whoever wins, they cheer for each other so loudly and they seem genuinely happy for each other.”
David Thunell, 35, from Utah, has competed in the ISA Utah Tree Climbing Championships over 10 times and nationally five times. He said it’s a treat to attend the North American Tree Climbing Championship.
“This is just the coolest competition that you can be a part of because of the community and because of the climbers that are here for that,” Thunell said. “You’ll see that each of the climbers, we’re just one big family. Everybody’s just cheering each other on: we’re sharing tips, we’re giving each other advice while we’re climbing and everybody just wants everybody else to succeed, which you don’t see in a lot of competitions. It’s such a cool environment, and it’s really cool to rub shoulders with the best climbers in North America and be a part of this community."
On Sunday, James Earhart (Mid-Atlantic Chapter) and Anna Sonnenfeld (Ohio Chapter) won the ISA 2026 NATCC Masters' Challenge in the men’s and women’s divisions, qualifying them to participate in the 50th Annual International Tree Climbing Championship in St. Louis on October 9-11, 2026.
Joe Wurzel took second place and Valentin Brito took third place in the men’s division. Aneesa Winn took second place in the women’s division, and Davey arborist Sarah Hood-Recant placed third, won the head-to-head ascent event, and took home the Spirit of the Competition award.