29/10/2026
Watch a crew take down a big limb over a glasshouse and you see pretty quickly who has actually thought it through.
Some say rigging is where the trade shows itself. Load, angle, friction, timber condition, groundie communication, all of it running at once with no room to wing it. Others reckon that is too narrow. Plenty of top hands spend their days on precise pruning, assessing decay, reading a tree's future and talking a nervous client through it, and that judgement is just as hard won.
The tension is what we quietly rank as "real" arboriculture. Climbing schools and comps tend to reward the spectacular, while the slow skills get less attention. In smaller towns a lot of the work is pruning and reports, not big dismantles, and those crews can feel written off.
So does rigging really sit above the rest?
