Katelyn Johnson’s workday starts in the dark.
She wakes up at 4am at her home near Tahoe, California, and drives to the cutting site while the peaks of the Sierra Nevada are still just shapes.
She walks out to her strip (the block of timber she’s responsible for that day) and waits for enough light to see what she’s doing. Then the saw starts.
“As soon as you can see, you start working,” she tells us. By noon, she’s usually headed home to file saw chains for the next morning.
Johnson is a timber faller and a certified arborist, which means she does close to everything a person can do with a chainsaw and a rope. Some months it’s residential yards, some months she’s contracted onto active wildfires, cutting the burnt and unstable trees firefighters aren’t qualified to handle.
The rest is logging and thinning, deep in mountainous terrain most of the rest of us will never see.
From an Ohio Farm to Big Western Timber
Johnson grew up in a small town in western Ohio, helping her grandparents raise animals on their farm.
That grew into a wildfire management degree at Ohio State, then into a job that had nothing to do with the one she’d planned.
“I wanted to do something related to trees, and I didn’t find a forestry job,” she explains. “But, I found a local arborist company that was looking for help.
She applied, she says, on a limb.
“I had no idea what I was going to be doing. But I tried it out, and I just ended up really liking it. And then I got involved with the climbing.”
Several years of residential work around Columbus, Ohio followed, then a move to chase bigger trees. She now runs her own outfit, Sure Shot Forestry, and shares the work with a few hundred thousand followers on social media.
The job does not forgive a bad day.
“You have to be thinking multiple steps ahead, looking above you for things that can come down and get you,” she says.
“A lot of people just think of the tree falling on you. But there’s so many other things besides that. Branches break off and rain down on the stump after it goes over.”
Eleven years in, she’s had nothing worse than minor injuries. That’s the multiple-steps-ahead thing, all day every day.
“I could never have imagined this is where I would end up,” Johnson says. “But now that I’m here, I can’t imagine myself in any other place.”
Working Out of a Bronco
Ask Johnson what role vehicles play in her work, and the answer is immediate: “That’s my lifeline going to work, I wouldn’t be able to do my job without it.”
The roads she uses are not roads the way most people understand the word.
Muddy logging spurs churned up by heavy equipment. Old fire roads so overgrown the branches catch the mirrors. And, since she works the western Sierra, there’s snow, sometimes feet of it.
Johnson started using a Bronco early last year.
“The off-road capability1 definitely really matters,” she says. “Even on a super messed up road, you almost don’t even feel it.”
Snowstorms are where the Bronco SUV’s capability matters most. When trees come down across roofs and driveways and she’s dispatching to emergency jobs in feet of snow, getting there reliably is the job.
Johnson’s own SUV is a Badlands® with the optional Sasquatch® package.
In those types of conditions, she says she mostly puts the vehicle in four-wheel drive and leaves it there. When the roads turn to ice, she switches the Bronco G.O.A.T. MODES® (Goes Over Any Type of Terrain) system to Slippery mode, optimizing throttle response, traction control, and 4x4 engagement for slick conditions.
What she keeps coming back to is how little effort it takes to make the most of the Bronco SUV’s capability in gnarly winter conditions.
“Just the click of a switch, and you’re in whatever mode for whatever conditions you’re driving in,” Johnson says.
Is a Bronco enough truck for forestry work? The answer is that her load out is smaller than most people assume.
“I don’t have a massive amount of gear,” she explains. “It’s chainsaws, wedges, axes, and fuel. So I’m able to pack everything in there, and I’ve adapted it to fit my needs.”
“You have to be thinking multiple steps ahead, looking above you for things that can come down and get you.”timber faller and certified arborist Katelyn Johnson
Meeting the Bronco Filson
There’s a symmetry between Johnson and the new Bronco Filson™.2
The Ford and Filson relationship began in 2020, with a concept vehicle built around wildland firefighting: a Bronco outfitted for the people who drive toward smoke.
As Dave Rivers, former head of Ford’s enthusiast brands explains, that collaboration turned up an older connection: both outfitted Forest Service workers in the 1960s.
Filson, founded in 1897 to kit out Klondike prospector was rewriting its brand book at the time and had already landed on the line that, if Filson were a car, it would be a vintage Bronco.
Six years later, that connection is taking the form of a production vehicle.
Johnson recently got a special first look at the Bronco Filson SUV when Ford invited her deep into the woods with other creators and stewards to test-run the vehicle in their natural habitats.
She found both familiar and new in the Filson. It runs the same Sasquatch package as her current Badlands, with the same 35-inch tires, but the Filson upgrades to Fox remote reservoir shocks, plus the Bronco Raptor’s twin-turbo, 3.0-liter EcoBoost V6.
But to Johnson the most notable difference comes from the unique Field Green Metallic paint.3
“I love the way it looks,” she says.
What held her attention was the storage. Filson-inspired removable bags sit in the doors and in the triangle of the rear sports bar, cut from water and dirt-resistant material, and use magnets instead of snap buttons so you can open and close them one-handed.
Plus, they’re removable, so you can take the whole bag, and not just its contents with you.
“I have so many little knickknacks — chains and chainsaw parts — just lots of little things that get lost easily floating around the back of the truck,” she says. “Having a little bit more storage and organization is really nice.”
Johnson’s worn less Filson than her friends have. Half the industry lives in the brand’s tin cloth jackets. But, she knows exactly what the brand makes.
“Rugged, durable outdoor clothing that’s authentic, real stuff that people actually wear and use,” she says. “The kind of gear they make for unfavorable conditions, that’s basically what the Bronco embodies, but in vehicle form.”
Asked what tree rigging has in common with pulling a stuck truck out of a mud pit, Johnson goes straight to the thing that keeps her alive: “You’re putting a lot of trust in whatever piece of gear you’re using, whether it’s for vehicle recovery, or for bringing down giant pieces of wood on ropes.”
Work With a Purpose
“What I hope people get most from my page is just the importance of tree work and forest management, and being stewards of our forests,” Johnson says. “A lot of times people don’t really understand it, or don’t even think about it at all.”
In a yard, that might look like pruning a tree so it’s not a hazard to a house. In the mountains, that could look like thinning. And it's in her posts about forestry work where Johnson gets the most pushback.
“In California there’s a lot of benefits to forest thinning because there’s actually more trees than ever before, historically, and that contributes to our massive wildfires,” she explains. “People see a tree being removed and they don’t really understand how overstocked our forests are. When we thin trees out, it allows the remaining trees to grow faster and larger. And it reduces the risk of mega wildfires.”
That work is supported by Ford. A portion of every Bronco sale goes to the Bronco Wild Fund, which in collaboration with the National Forest Foundation has planted more than 2.3 million trees across 42 reforestation sites. One tree for every Bronco and Bronco Sport sold.
For Johnson, the work is about better enabling people and nature to coexist. “It’s about helping us live safely amongst trees,” the arborist says.
Longtime outdoor journalist Wes Siler is a From the Road contributor. He'll help you get more from your time outside on his Substack newsletter.
What to Read Next
1 Always consult the Owner’s Manual before off-road driving, know your terrain and trail difficulty, and use appropriate safety gear.
2 Filson is a trademark of C.C. Filson Co. used under license.
3 Extra-cost color option.
