Last Updated on April 14, 2026 by admin
Three feet of snow covered East Providence, Rhode Island. The wind hadn’t stopped in two days. And 50 feet above it all, on a branch bending under ice, a white-and-gray cat named Pixie hadn’t moved since Sunday night.
Her owner had tried everything. A two-by-four propped against the trunk. Plastic chairs stacked in the yard. Old tires rolled over to build some kind of platform. Nothing worked. Pixie was too high, too cold, and too paralyzed with fear to come down on her own.
Heather MacKinnon, a neighbor in East Providence, first spotted Pixie in the tree on Monday evening as the Blizzard of 2026 tore through the state. Providence had just shattered its all-time snowfall record — 37.9 inches and still falling. Streets were impassable. Schools were closed for the week. The National Guard was deployed.
MacKinnon called the police. She called the fire department. She called animal control. Every answer was the same: we can’t get there. Try a tree service.
No tree service was operating in a record-breaking blizzard.
A Nextdoor Post Changed Everything
MacKinnon called her aunt, who had one more idea: post it on Nextdoor.
She put up a photo of Pixie — barely visible against the white sky, hunched on a branch that looked too thin to hold her — and asked if anyone in the neighborhood could help.
Matt Lyons saw the post Tuesday morning. He’s a member of Ironworkers Local 37. Climbing steel in bad weather is literally what he does for a living.
Lyons and his sister drove through the unplowed streets to MacKinnon’s block. He looked up at the tree — 50 feet of ice-coated bark with a cat-shaped lump near the top — and started climbing.
Fifty Feet of Ice
Every branch was glazed over. Three feet of packed snow sat on the ground below him. Lyons climbed without gear — no harness, no ropes, no helmet. Just hands, boots, and the kind of grip you build after years of walking steel beams through New England winters.
When he reached Pixie, she didn’t fight. She didn’t scramble higher up the tree. She pressed into him.
“She wanted to be safe,” Lyons told the Boston Globe afterward. “She was just petrified, overall freezing. Couldn’t stop shaking.”
He tucked her into his sweatshirt for the first half of the descent, her head poking out near his collar so she could breathe. When he got close enough to the ground, the neighbors who had gathered below — because of course they had — threw him a backpack. He slipped Pixie inside and climbed the rest of the way down.
Home
The video of the rescue, filmed by MacKinnon, reached WHDH 7News, the Boston Globe, Newsweek, and Dexerto within 48 hours. A man climbing 50 feet up an ice-covered tree in the worst blizzard Rhode Island has ever recorded — for a cat he’d never met — is the kind of footage that doesn’t need a caption.
Pixie is home now. She’s warm, she’s eating, and according to her owner, she has shown exactly zero interest in going back outside.
Rhode Island broke its snowfall record that week. Matt Lyons just broke a few branches on his way back down.