Hundreds of feet in the air, Angela VanWiemeersch nears the top of the radio tower she’s been climbing. When she reaches the top, though, that’s when the real work begins.

“It’s just really airy,” she says of the feeling of being up there at the top. “With rock climbing, sometimes you can feel a little closer to the wall, which gives you some perspective and something to frame your vision. But when you're on a tower and there's just a void of space all around you, it feels very airy; it feels very surreal. Sometimes I don't fully realize where I am or what I'm doing until I'm off the tower, and then I look back at it. It’s a very strange place to hold focus. Sometimes you're just dangling and there's nothing to touch or hold onto except for what you're working on with your hands, and it’s just very strange.”

Sometimes, poor weather causes work to be postponed, but not always. “It’s almost always windy,” she says. “We do try to go up in good weather when we’re doing electrical work or stuff like that, but if there's an emergency and a station's down or communication is down, then we go up in bad weather. The biggest battle for me is often wind. It's much harder to focus when it's really windy and it's really loud and you're freezing. You really need to hone in what you're doing up there and settle down, calm your mind, and focus on the task at hand.”

Even before her career climbing towers, Angela was no stranger to heights. She was a passionate and well-known ice and rock climber for a decade before getting certified as a rope access technician. She loved the way climbing took her to places she never would have journeyed to otherwise, places vastly different than where she’d grown up in suburban Detroit.

“I always had a travel bug, and I always was really interested in the world around me,” she says. “I loved where climbing brought me in nature and how it allowed me to experience the world through a different lens.”