Tree Service in Kittitas County, WA

Snow country at the pass, dry pine through the upper valley, irrigated town forest down on the floor. Those are three different jobs stacked end to end between Snoqualmie Pass and the basalt at Vantage, and the advice that fits one of them is usually wrong for the other two.

The Crest Cuts This County in Two

West of Easton you are still in westside forest — Pacific silver fir, mountain hemlock, western hemlock — and the snowpack is measured in feet. The failure mode up there is load rather than drought. Wet snow bends young stems until they take a permanent set, breaks tops out of hemlock, and snaps leaders off anything that grew up crowded and slender.

Drop east through Cle Elum and the forest changes inside about fifteen miles. Rainfall falls away, ponderosa pine and Douglas fir take over with western larch mixed through, and by the valley floor the native cover is shrub-steppe with a ribbon of black cottonwood and willow along the Yakima River and the creeks coming down out of the Manastash and the Naneum.

Nobody on the Valley Floor Has a Native Shade Tree

Nearly every tree shading a yard in Ellensburg, Kittitas or Thorp is there because somebody planted it and somebody waters it. The older stock leans heavily on Siberian elm, black locust, silver maple and Lombardy poplar — species that tolerate the climate and pay for it with brittle wood and included bark at every fork.

What people miss is how tightly those trees are tied to the water. Roots follow the sprinkler pattern or the lay of a flood-irrigated pasture and stay shallow, because there is no reason to go deeper. Change the delivery — a district schedule shifts, a pasture goes out of production, a line gets rerouted for a subdivision — and mature trees start thinning within a couple of seasons. It is almost never the disease people assume it is.

Then add the wind. The pressure difference across the Cascades has to go somewhere and in this county it goes down the Kittitas Valley, which is why the wind machines sit on the ridges above Vantage instead of somewhere with a better view. Steady one-directional loading on a shallow irrigated root plate, over stacked basalt flows with only a thin cap of loess on top, is a combination that puts big planted maples on the ground in a way nobody expects until it happens.

Fire Ground Around Cle Elum, Roslyn and the Teanaway

The upper county is dry pine and fir that historically burned often and lightly and now carries far more stems per acre than it once did. Thread second homes and resort lots through that and you get the textbook interface problem: fuel running continuously from grass to brush to low limbs to crown, ending at a deck. Thinning, limbing up and pulling brush back from structures is the most useful tree work anyone performs up there, and it is work we are genuinely set up to do at scale.

Start With Your Town, Not the County

Choose a town below for the closer read — species mix, soils, wind exposure and the access problems that come with each.