Tree Service in Skamania County, WA

Most of Skamania County is not anybody's back yard. National forest and the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area account for the great bulk of it, and private ground amounts to a narrow band along the river plus a few side valleys running north. That means a small number of people living hard against an enormous amount of standing timber.

A Rainfall Gradient You Can Drive Across in Half an Hour

Stand at Bonneville and you are in soaked western Washington — hemlock, redcedar, sword fern, moss on every north face. Drive east past Underwood and Cook and Oregon white oak and ponderosa pine start showing up on the south-facing slopes. The drop in annual rainfall between the west end of this county and the east end is about as sharp as anywhere in the state.

That matters because a Douglas fir at Carson and a Douglas fir at Underwood are living completely different lives. West-end trees deal with saturation, root disease and windthrow. East-end trees deal with summer drought stress, beetle pressure and fire. Advice that is right for one is wrong for the other, thirty minutes apart on the same highway.

The Gorge Blows Both Ways, and Freezes One of Them

In winter, cold dry air pours west out of the Columbia Basin and through the Gorge. When a warm, wet Pacific front pushes in against it, the rain falls into that cold layer and the western Gorge gets freezing rain. Ice loading is the signature tree failure here — broken tops, stripped limbs, whole conifers laid over — and it comes around often enough that anybody who has lived at Stevenson or North Bonneville a while has cleaned up after it.

In summer the pattern reverses and it blows hard from the west most afternoons. Trees on gorge-facing ground get worked from opposite directions half a year apart, which is why so many of them are one-sided, carrying heavy reaction wood on one flank and thin, brittle growth on the other.

Ground That Moves, and Ground That Grew Back All at Once

The north shore of the Gorge is old landslide country. The slide that once dammed the Columbia below Stevenson is the famous piece of it, and material in that area is still moving slowly. Trees on creeping ground lean, correct, and lean again, and their root plates are working in material that will not stay put. A sweeping trunk on a slope here is information about the hillside, not character.

The north end of the county is the opposite problem. The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens flattened a great deal of country up there, and much of what grew back came in at the same time. Even-aged stands of the same species at roughly the same height have very little structural variation, so when a wind or wet-snow event finds their weak point, it finds all of them at once.

Land use inside the Scenic Area boundary is reviewed under its own framework, and county, town and federal boundaries overlap in places along the river. What applies differs by parcel and changes over time, so check with Skamania County before assuming a removal on your own ground is entirely your call.

Communities We Cover in Skamania County

Stevenson, Carson, North Bonneville, Underwood and the smaller places along the river and up the Wind River each sit at a different point on that gradient, with different species, different exposure and different rules. Pick yours below.