Climbing Trees With the Star Arborists of Central Park

Reported by Vogue.

Central Park has 19,000 trees spread across 843 acres, and exactly five people are responsible for keeping them alive. They climb. They prune. They diagnose. And this spring, according to Vogue, a single viral TikTok turned the Central Park Conservancy's arborist team into the internet's most unexpected obsession — comment sections flooded with genuine admiration for the work and, let's be honest, for the workers themselves.

The team — K Satterthwaite, Brady Byers, Dylan Barrett-Smith, Dylan Berger, and Jordan Foreman — operates year-round under the Conservancy, a nonprofit that has managed the park since 1980 independently of the city's Parks Department. Their days involve evaluating tree health, structural assessments, and scaling canopies in harnesses to prune century-old elms and beeches. It is, by every measure, a physical, technical, deeply skilled profession. None of them exactly planned for it. Barrett-Smith, who studied biology and came up through Brooklyn Bridge Park, put it plainly: he didn't dream of being an arborist as a kid because he didn't know it was a job. Berger, the newest member with six months on the team, once had a fear of heights. He now calls it "the job of a lifetime."

Why the Internet Can't Look Away

There's something almost radical about watching people who work entirely outside, with their hands, moving through living things at 75 feet above the Manhattan skyline. Barrett-Smith described a recent moment above the canopy — bucket truck, midtown spread out below, the city buzzing beneath him — as a perspective you almost never access unless you're paying hotel-room prices for it. The arborists don't just see New York differently; they've memorized it. Byers, three years in, said it plainly: "My life is just these trees."

Satterthwaite, the tree care manager with seven years at the Conservancy, came to arboriculture through public green space restoration and never looked back. She also runs the park's adopt-a-tree endowment program, helping visitors dedicate trees to people they've lost. The work is technical and physical, yes — but it is also, quietly, an act of public service. "Caring for these trees and feeling like I'm doing something for the public good," Satterthwaite said, "that's really fulfilling."

The viral moment caught the team off guard — Barrett-Smith doesn't even have Instagram; his mom texted him the news — but the fascination makes sense. In a culture drowning in screens and optimization, five people spending their days literally rooted in something real, tangible, and alive is not just charming. It's aspirational.

When your entire job is looking up, it turns out the rest of us can't stop looking, either.

Read the original at Vogue.