04/22/2026
We were tasked with trimming these palms that haven’t been trimmed in many years. These are the truly dangerous palm trees to trim and the kind of situation most often responsible for climbers losing their lives. The danger lies in the unpredictability of all those dead limbs (often referred to as a skirt, or a dress in this case). Over time water can pe*****te into those dead fronds and cause them to deteriorate near the base. When they become deteriorated enough they can fall off the tree and often you will see them having slid down the tree and at the base of one of these trees still in a ring around the trunk. In nature that is how these trees self prune and if they are exposed to a lot of wind it happens pretty quickly and you won’t see trees with these kind of dresses of dead limbs very often. When a climber tries to trim one of these trees, they have to climb up under that dress and start trimming layer by layer and what can happen is in the worst case scenario, the whole dress can become dislodged by the climber’s activity and all fall on them at once. I had this happen to me early on in my climbing days. Luckily for me, I had made my way through about 1/3 of the dress and the 2/3 that came down on me, I was just able to push it far enough off me to work my chainsaw through it and cut myself free. It was still quite a scary experience and I learned a valuable lesson. We don’t climb under the canopy in these kinds of situations anymore. If we don’t have the bucket truck or a boom, we sometimes throw a big ladder up on the tree over the dead limbs if possible, but it is a challenging job however we do it. These particular trees had bees, wasps, and in the third one, an owl nest which warranted us waiting to trim that one until those eggs hatch and the baby owls fly away. Please make sure you are aware of these dangers and trim your palms regularly so it doesn’t become a dangerous situation, but if it is already there, make sure whoever you hire to trim it, knows the dangers.
