Tree Service in Burien, WA

Two different cities live inside Burien's limits. Inland, east of Ambaum, the ground is flat and platted tight, with small postwar houses put up quickly for Boeing families, service drops crossing back lots, and a fence inside reach of nearly every trunk. West of there the land breaks into ravines and short steep faces running down to Puget Sound, the lots get older and stranger, and the trees get very big.

The Flat Side and the Water Side Fail Differently

On the inland side the constraint is almost never the tree. It is the six feet between the tree and something expensive. Those plats left narrow side yards, shared fence lines and overhead wire crossing back corners, so a fifty-foot fir that would be a straightforward fall in open country turns into a rigging job taken down in pieces. Ask a bidder how they plan to get it out and listen closely, because the answer tells you whether anyone actually looked.

On the water side the issue is slope and reach. The ravines dropping through Seahurst and Shorewood cut into layered glacial deposits, the same stratigraphy that gives this whole shoreline its seep lines and slumping. Trees on those faces are holding surface soil in place. Some genuinely do need to come out. Clearing a face wholesale for an outlook is a different proposition and usually a costly one.

Three Tree Point Is an Access Problem With a Tree in It

The road down to the point is narrow, steep and single lane in stretches, with houses tight to the shoulder and nowhere to turn a chip truck around. Cabins from the twenties and thirties sit on parcels not much bigger than a driveway, with madrona and Douglas fir leaning out over the rooflines. Pricing that off a photograph is guesswork. It gets walked or it does not get quoted.

What Actually Fails Around Here

• Black cottonwood along the creek bottoms, fast-grown and brittle, and the species most likely to drop a large limb on a still day
• Madrona on the dry west-facing slopes, which declines quietly and keeps its shape long after the wood has given up
• Edge Douglas fir left standing when the lot next door was scraped for infill housing
• Bigleaf maple carrying a codominant union that opens under a wet snow load
• Old plum, cherry and apple from the orchard-era yards, hollow at the base and much closer to the house than whoever planted them intended

Approval Here Can Come From More Than One Office

Burien has its own rules covering tree removal, and parcels near the shoreline, a ravine or a stream can pick up further review. Parts of the city also sit beneath Sea-Tac approach paths, where aviation obstruction limits can apply to tree height on top of everything the city requires. None of that is worth guessing at or taking a contractor at his word on. Check your address with the City of Burien, and with the Port if you sit under an approach, because these requirements change and ours is not the last word.

Ryan does the estimates himself, and on a Burien job he is looking at three things before he ever looks up at the tree: where the truck can sit, what the ground underneath is doing, and whether somebody closer to you could do the same work for less money.