Tree Service in Lincoln County, WA

Drive Highway 2 across this county in August and it looks like nothing but stubble and sky. The trees are all in three places: town blocks, farmstead yards, and the breaks where the ground falls away toward the Columbia. Each of those is a different problem.

Scabland Basalt Puts a Hard Floor Under Every Root

The Ice Age floods came through this country and peeled the loess off in braided channels, leaving bare rock ribs between islands of soil that survived. Farm ground sits on the islands. Towns and farmsteads went in wherever the dirt was deep enough for a well and a cellar, and even on the good ground the basalt is often only a few feet down.

A tree in that situation cannot go deep, so it goes wide — and it goes wide in soil that bakes hard by July. Shallow and drought-stressed is a poor combination in country where nothing slows the wind. Trees here do not usually snap off. They tip, and they bring a plate of dirt and rock up with them.

It also means stump work is rougher than people expect. A grinder that would sink out of sight in Cowlitz County loam spends its day riding on rock, and anyone quoting the job sight unseen is guessing.

Pine Comes Down the Draws Along the Lake Roosevelt Breaks

The northern edge of the county is a different place entirely. Where the land drops toward the reservoir around Fort Spokane, Hawk Creek and Seven Bays, ponderosa pine works its way down the draws and holds on the north-facing slopes. The northeast corner out toward Reardan picks up pine too, on the same moisture gradient that carries the Spokane forest west until it finally runs out.

Pine on that ground deserves different treatment from a planted yard tree. It is native, it fits the site, and it responds well to having the crowded understory and the ladder fuel pulled out from under it. Left alone, that same material is exactly what carries fire uphill into a cabin above the water.

Town and Farmstead Trees That All Went In at Once

Davenport, Wilbur, Odessa, Harrington and Sprague were planted by people using whatever would live: Siberian elm, black locust, Lombardy poplar, silver maple, box elder, and later blue spruce and Austrian pine. Those species do survive here. The fast ones are also brittle, and most of them went in during the same handful of decades.

So the failures arrive in clusters rather than one at a time. A town gets thirty good years of shade out of a row of elms and then a decade of limb drops out of that same row. Poplars go hollow at the butt while the crown still looks respectable. Around Odessa, where the water comes from deep wells rather than a canal and those wells have been under pressure for years, a planted tree is a bigger bet than it looks.

When somebody calls us from across the state, it is usually because they have decided to deal with the whole thing at once instead of one tree per windstorm:

• A farmstead yard cleared of dead and dying planted stock, stumps ground, ground left workable
• A street or a shop yard where a full row of brittle elm or poplar has aged out together
• Thinning and fuel work on pine ground above Lake Roosevelt
• A written assessment on a tree somebody wants to keep, from someone not bidding the removal

Lincoln County Towns We Cover

Pick a town below for the local detail — what grows there, what tends to fail there, and what to check before anyone starts cutting.