Arborist is climbing to win

Kathy Holzer loves it when someone tells her to "go climb a tree." She doesn't take it as an insult.

It's an invitation.

Holzer, 41, never outgrew her childhood passion for climbing trees. Now she makes her living at it, and if all goes well this weekend, she may also come home the world champion.

Holzer will compete this weekend at the International Tree Climbing Championship in Minneapolis as part of the International Society of Arboriculture's annual meeting.

Holzer, who owns Out On A Limb Tree Co., a pruning and removal service, got in some last-minute training this week, swinging precariously from the top of a 75-foot blue atlas cedar in the Madison Park neighborhood. She was also getting some work done, lopping off branches with surgical precision to let light fill the lower canopy.

The job, which rates second only to offshore fishing for causing work-related death and injury, is part trapeze work, part rock-climbing skills and part aerial choreography.

The flexible Holzer might have been a gymnast in another life, an observer noted.

"Or a monkey," she said.

Training for the Olympics of tree climbing should be a walk in the park in Seattle, which is practically the tree capital of the United States. But it isn't. In fact, it's illegal.

Holzer, who lives in West Seattle, is frequently evicted from the trees at Lincoln Park, where she likes to climb. She sometimes substitutes going to the gym, but mostly she gets on-the-job training.

The five events she will compete in this weekend include the throw ball, which requires dead aim as the climber throws a weighted bag attached to a rope through the top limbs to set up ropes for a climb.

Then there's the foot-lock event, which demands the climber use her feet to wrap a rope around her ankles until she creates a "platform" to hike up a notch, a technique climbers use to shimmy up a tree.

"It's pretty aerobic," she said. One year, she went to the park three to four hours every day for three months to practice the foot lock.

"I lost 5 pounds," she said. That year, 2004, she also won the world championship, the title she hopes to snatch back this year.

A third event is called aerial rescue. Competitors free a dummy dangling in a tree to simulate the recovery of an injured arborist (or parachutist, or downed pilot.) They have five minutes to assess the "injured party," set up a climbing system and get the subject down to the ground, all the while giving reassurances such as, "You're going to be OK, buddy."

To practice that, she sometimes has to enlist the aid of her crew. "I rescued Chris the other day," she said, pointing to the guy working the chipper.

The fourth event is the speed climb. Competitors rope up and climb as fast as they can to hit a bell at the top of the tree.

Does she get an adrenalin rush doing that?

"No, an asthma attack!"

The last event is Holzer's personal favorite, and what she calls the downhill slalom.

"It most closely approximates tree work," she said. Climbers start at the top of a 100-foot tree and belay their way down, hitting different stations with bells and bull's-eyes on the way.

It's like doing the balance beam, uneven parallel bars and vault events combined while being suspended by ropes -- sometimes upside down.

This year, Holzer will compete against a field of 18 women, the most ever. Also competing from the Seattle area is Dan Kraus of Everett-based Cat in a Tree Rescue, the defending 2005 men's world champion. Men have been competing since 1976. The women's division wasn't created until 2001.

Working and training in treetops carry a set of workplace hazards that would chill even the most hardened OSHA inspector. Holzer has gotten an electrical shock (tipping a 6-foot limb into a high-voltage wire), been hacked with pruning saws and bonked with falling branches. She once fell out of a tree after encountering a hornet nest bigger than her head. "I got stung by my eye, and I landed on my butt," she said.

Tree work requires split-second timing, the concentration of a hawk and a tolerance for sap -- as well as catlike agility, but unlike cats, no fear of getting down (she's rescued a few.)

She loves it, though. "It forces me to explore the edge of my abilities," she said. "I feel compelled to get to the ends (of the branches.) That's the hard part -- it forces me to be 100 percent present and exist in my body."

She got her start at age 30 while working for a landscape crew. She hauled a lot of brush, but climbed trees, too. "When I found out I could make a living at it, I never looked back."

Growing up 35 miles outside Chicago on eight acres of fruit trees, she spent her formative years climbing branches and giving her father fits in the process. (He still can't watch her compete, although her mother and two sisters will be in Minneapolis to cheer her on.)

Even as a child, she would instinctively break off the dead branches and toss them to the ground.

"I was pruning at age 7," she said.

Now a licensed arborist, she uses more sophisticated equipment. She hauls a wood chipper behind a yellow pickup with a bumper sticker that says, "Tree Preservationist on Board" (plus one that says "Chicks who Rip").

A poet when she's land-bound, she can't afford any distractions in the air. "You can't spare the focus," she said. "If your mind wanders, you get hurt."

She'll be concentrating this weekend with her eye on the prize. But it's not just the glory she's after.

She could win a chain saw.

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