Well, that was not fun, either for her or for us.
I should use a math formula about measuring the height of a tree by measuring its shadow and comparing it to the height and shadow of a much shorter object. Similar right triangles thing. But I’m guessing that the tree is more than a hundred feet tall, and our six-month-old kitten was up very close to the top.
Many years ago but within my memory, I climbed up a much smaller tree. I discovered that it is much easier to go up than to come down, unless one uses the gravitational method, which can hurt when one hits the ground. My dad pulled out a ladder and was able to retrieve me. I never tried that again.
In this kitten case, we have no ladder anywhere near long enough. She kept looking for an easy way down, that did not require her to come straight down. The bark is thick and her claws are sharp, but she didn’t know to turn around and back down. (Which is what my dad kept trying to tell me to do, with the same result.)
Because the thick branch she was on grew out of the tree at a reasonable angle, she did manage to get down to a fork in the big branches. That was still out of range of our ladder. If she had backed down a few feet, we could have reached her, but kittens don’t speak English. (Of course, I did, but that didn’t help.)
The moral of this story is that one cannot come down by going up.