Climbing up trees, wrangling with ropes and navigating twisted odd-angled limbs may not be everyone’s idea of a great day.
But it is to Jordyn Dyck, who has turned her job as an arborist into a passion leading to international tree-climbing competitions.
“(In my) mid-20s, I had tried a bunch of different jobs — mostly labour-intensive ones — and just nothing was really fulfilling my soul in the way that I kind of needed. And then somebody told me you could climb a tree (for work), and that felt like a good path to follow,” she said while trimming a large oak towering over a two-storey home in west Winnipeg.
“I think my favourite part is that it’s so hard. It’s impossible to kind of perfect it. You have to be mentally strong, physically strong. You’ve got to have a good understanding of biology and physics and angles and forces …