Tree Service in Bunker Hill, WA

Most Bunker Hill calls start with somebody on a deck looking down at a fir that has gotten taller than they are comfortable with. Before we quote it, we want to know what that tree is doing for the property, because on this slope the answer is usually more than shade.

The Screen Between Your House and the Corridor Is Worth Keeping

Houses here back onto noise. Freeway traffic runs at the bottom of the hill day and night, trains work the line below that, and the gap funnels sound and weather straight up the slope. The band of conifers between a house and that corridor is why the back yard is usable at all. Clear it in one afternoon and you have swapped a tree problem for a noise problem that only twenty years of new growth will fix.

So the first question on the estimate is whether the defect can be handled without losing the stem. A dead top can be reduced. A hanging limb just comes off. A splitting codominant union can sometimes be cabled, braced and watched instead. Plenty of trees are past that point and we will say so plainly, but the question is worth asking before the saw comes out.

Alder Comes Free With a Cut Bank, and It Does Not Last

Every road cut, utility corridor and house pad on this hill left bare mineral soil behind, and red alder colonizes that ground faster than anything else in southwest Washington. That is why so many properties here have a wall of alder on the bank that nobody planted and nobody wants.

Alder earns its keep for a while and then it stops. It is short-lived next to the conifers around it, it decays from the top down, and it drops limbs in wind a fir would shrug off. Above a driveway or a parked truck, that becomes a monthly nuisance rather than a storm event. Where it has crowded the drip line of a cedar you want to keep, pulling it out is the cheapest favor you can do that tree.

Removals on a Benched Lot Are Rigging Jobs

Nearly every buildable pad up here was cut into the hillside: a flat bench with a steep bank above and a steeper drop below. Uphill is that cut bank; downhill is the road, a shop, a neighbor roofline, or a hundred feet of brush somebody then has to climb back out of.

So the tree comes down in pieces on rope, with the rigging point set in the part of the stem we have not cut yet. That is where the hours go here. The number at the bottom of the estimate is driven less by the height of the tree than by what sits underneath it and how far brush travels to reach the chipper.

• Hazard fir and cedar overhanging benched house pads
• Alder and volunteer maple cleared off cut banks and driveway edges
• Piece-by-piece rigging where no drop zone exists
• Dead-top reduction and crown cleaning on screen trees worth saving
• Storm cleanup on the single-lane drives off the hill
• Stump grinding where the grinder has one way in

Wind Wraps Around a Hill This Size

Out on the flat, wind is simple. It arrives from the south, everyone knows it, and the trees have grown their reaction wood accordingly. On an isolated slope beside a river gap it stops being simple. Air compresses over the top and rolls off the back side, so trees on the lee face get loaded from a direction they never built for. The fir that fails here is very often the one on the sheltered side nobody worried about.

The other constant is the brand new edge tree. Somebody opens up a pad or a turnaround, and firs that spent forty years buried in a stand are suddenly alone with tall crowns and no taper. They do not adapt in one season. If you have cleared recently, have someone look at what is left standing before winter.