SUPPORTIVE WORK ENVIORNMENT HELPS JENNY REXROAD REACH NEW HEIGHTS

A passion for tree climbing and supportive, on-the-job training led Jenny Rexroad to her dream job as climber and crew chief at Madison Tree Care & Landscaping in Milford, Ohio, where she has worked since March 2019.“It’s a real positive work environment,” says Rexroad, formerly a horticulture student at the University of Cincinnati. “I’ve heard horror stories about other places where they want you to beat yourself up and get the work done super quickly. But where I work, my boss is more about longevity, because the company makes more money and has more success as a productive tree company when they don’t have such high turnover. So they really focus on our health and well being.”

Madison Tree Care, a 46-year TCIA member company, is a third-generation tree care and landscaping company run by the Butcher family, with about 50 employees.

Rexroad points out that when first hired, she would get tired with work she wasn’t used to, and her boss would OK days off to rest. “It would have been a lot harder for me working at a company that wasn’t like that,” she says.

To make employees’ lives easier, Madison is invested in mechanization. “We have a machine for basically every job,” Rexroad says. “Most crews don’t go out without a machine. We drag some brush, but mostly we have branch managers – tracked loaders or mini skid-steers with grapple heads for grabbing logs and brush – and wheeled loaders for grabbing heavy logs.” The company also has grapple trucks for picking up loads of wood and brush to take away from job sites, chippers, compact/tracked lifts for risky trees and bucket trucks for easy-access trees.

The other component to employees’ wellbeing is teaching rope work that helps workers with proper work positioning, says Rexroad. “They don’t pick how you climb, but we teach SRT (static- or single-rope technique). We start people on double-rope, moving rope systems, and people can move to single rope if they want.

“We do training, especially in winter, and focus on how to do safe redirects on a tree, which is a big part of not wearing your body out, such as if you’re directly over the top of a branch rather than walking out to it at a really bad angle. Training climbers to be very efficient and to understand their equipment is really important to keep people in the game longer,” says Rexroad.

Passion and hard work
Jay Butcher, vice president/secretary of Madison Tree, says of Rexroad, “Jenny is an extremely hard-working arborist with a focus on the care of trees and the development of people with similar goals. In addition to exceptional work, she also provides our company with diversity in leadership positions, which in turn allows a broader spectrum of arborists to feel comfortable and accepted.”

Clearly, climbing is Rexroad’s passion. In her spare time, she rock climbs, inspired by fellow workers. She and climber/former co-worker Lily Soderland got certified in lead climbing (clip the rope as you go) at their local gym’s climbing walls. “We are super stoked about it,” says Rexroad. She also caves in Georgia with her boyfriend, Jimmie Sager (whom she met at a tree-climbing competition), rappelling into 100- to 300-foot deep pits and climbing back out. “I have rope experience with that, too,” she adds.

At Madison, “Training is on the job,” says Rexroad. That includes mini sessions sometimes before the day’s work, led by a group of three trainers and usually involving something more technical. “But I mostly learned on the job, and that is how I teach. I have a trainee right now, Jill Rapien, and she gets trained during the day with whatever work we are doing. Rapien was a trainer during her time in the Army, and is a hard-working and focused individual,” says Rexroad.

Rexroad’s own mentor is in his 60s and spends a lot of time operating an aerial lift. “That was nice for me. He would be in the bucket working on the same tree, so I could ask him questions. He could be all over the tree,” she recalls.

“I don’t get to do that with Jill,” she says. But they try out other training methods.

“(Recently), I taught her how to do something while she was up in the tree, and now that she understands the language I’m using, she was able to execute what I was describing to her,” Rexroad relates. “Following up, after lunch I got up in the tree myself, and she got to see me do it in a sequence. So she had hands-on training before and then saw me in a sequence. We agreed that was a pretty cool way to learn, but we don’t always have that option.”

Becoming a crew leader
Rexroad became a crew leader a year and a half ago. “It’s been a really awesome journey. I’ve always had my own philosophy about communication on a job site, and now I’ve been able to put it into practice.” What does that involve? “When someone messes up, not getting angry and figuring out how to communicate with people so they are receiving you well and not shutting down and are actually learning. I feel I’ve had a lot of success with it.”

The company sends out seven or eight crews on any given day on the tree side, each crew consisting of two to four people. Rexroad’s crew is a team of three women, she, Rapien and Anna Sonnenfeld, who has been a climber in the Pacific Northwest.

Sonnenfeld competed for her first time at the Ohio Tree Climbing Championship last year and did really well, says Rexroad. “She is a really good climber. All three of us are passionate about trees and really enjoy the variety and challenge that tree care provides on a daily basis. Plus the exercise!”

Rexroad herself has won two Ohio competitions. “Last year, I helped Jill and Anna prepare for their first competition. Our boss, Jay, really helps a lot with us getting prepared for a competition. We have three work climbs set up at the shop, and we practice on the weekends leading up to a competition,” she says. All three will compete again this year.

Sonnenfeld, Rexroad and Soderland (her gym climbing pal) all placed in the top three in nearly all events at the 2024 Ohio Tree Climbing Championship at the Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati last June. Soderland won the Master’s Challenge and a chance to represent Ohio in the international competition (ITCC) that took place in Atlanta last August.

Rapien has not competed in a TCC yet, says Rexroad, “but attended last year to practice on the weekends to learn, since she was a newer climber. Getting her in the tree for an aerial rescue during practice was really awesome.”

Women in tree care
What is Rexroad’s view on all-women crews? “Gender doesn’t necessarily figure into it, it’s really just who the person is you get along with,” she notes.

“One thing, though, is how cool it is that I’ve met so many women who are as rowdy as I am. All my life I’ve been out and about. I’ve been a tomboy. I like hanging out with guys because they are doing things I want to do, like hiking or camping or whatever,” Rexroad says. “Our crew, me, Jilly and Anna, are like kindred spirits. It’s been a really fun time. The jokes we say are just a whole lot different than what I hear on the guys’ crews, and also we can talk about our struggles as women in tree care.”

Another difference is her crew’s attitude toward wildlife.

“Any time we find wildlife, we try to figure out how to make sure they don’t get hurt,” says Rexroad, who in the past has taken baby squirrels to a wildlife rehabilitator she knows. “The babies sometimes do get injured or killed when the trees come down. Women care about the baby animals more than the guys,” she says.

As for her crew, “They’re all hard working, and I’m hard working, and we get a lot of stuff done. It feels really good to come up with a plan that no men helped you come up with. The communication is great, and Jill, as a trainee, is at two years and she’s still learning, but she’s really good at asking questions. I’ve trained some men before, and they say. ‘Oh, I know about that.’ Even personal trainers will talk about how women are easier to train, because they actually listen to what you tell them and don’t think they know everything right off the cuff,” Rexroad explains.

“Jay, my boss, is all about trying to get women into tree care, and so he’s stoked,” she says, adding that he even put her crew together, “I didn’t even ask for it,” she says. Madison has five women arborists on board in all.

“Also, we normally have a warm-up and yoga session led by me and Jill Rapien in the morning that all employees are welcome to join in on. That’s something Jay has always wanted for the employees, to prep for the day. We started it last year. The cold has put a damper on it recently,” she says.

Moving ahead
Another positive, the company helped Rexroad get her CDL four years ago, and, “I’m super thankful for that,” she says. “I drive a CDL truck every day to jobs. It’s an International chip truck towing a large Bandit chipper. I can use my class A CDL in many other industries. It’s a serious leg up.”

Where does Rexroad go from here in terms of career development?

“I’m honestly not sure. I like where I’m at, and I like being a part of this industry. I’m almost at six years. Part of me thinks I could do something else, but also I feel I have a responsibility now, because of all the accidents that happen in the industry, and I feel like knowing what I know, I want to share that with people. I want to stay in tree care and help raise up the next batch of tree climbers to be safe.

“But I’m also interested in the environment and plants. I want to do more training programs with kids in particular, but anyone really, just about our natural landscape around us and the greenscapes we have in the city. It would be cool to be a tree climber and have a side gig and bring it back to the community as to why trees are important, and why unclogged and unpolluted waterways are really important, too, for maintaining our green space. It’s just a dream to add on to, but I’m happy where I’m at.”

Tamsin Venn is founding publisher of the former Atlantic Coastal Kayaker magazine and author of the book “Sea Kayaking Along the New England Coast,” and has been a contributing writer to TCI Magazine since 2011. She lives in Ipswich, Massachusetts.

By Tamsin Venn

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