Tree Service in Spokane County, WA

The tree that defines Spokane County is ponderosa pine, and a good share of the trouble in the county comes from asking it to live in conditions it never evolved for — irrigated turf, cut and filled grades, and a lot line where a stand used to be.

Gravel, Basalt, and Water That Goes Straight Through

The Missoula floods stripped this country and dumped coarse outwash across the Spokane Valley floor. That gravel is why the aquifer is what it is, and it is also why water does not linger in the root zone. On the north side and out toward Five Mile and Indian Trail the story changes to thin soil over basalt and granite: roots hit rock, turn sideways, and build a plate that is wide, shallow and only as good as the ground it is pinned into.

Then people put lawns under those pines. Ponderosa is built for a dry summer and a dormant, droughty root zone; daily irrigation in heavy turf is a slow way to rot the roots off one. A declining pine in a green lawn is one of the most common calls in this county, and the cause is usually the sprinklers, the grade change from construction, or a utility trench cut through the root plate years earlier.

Legacy Pines Left Standing When the Subdivision Went In

A ponderosa grown in a closed stand is tall, straight and carries a small crown high up. It stands because the trees around it stand. Take the stand for lots, leave the prettiest half dozen, and those survivors are suddenly holding wind loads they never carried. Give them a few years of exposure plus a dry summer and the beetles find them — Ips in the tops and slash, western pine beetle in the stressed mature trees. By the time the crown fades the tree has usually been finished for a season.

Ice, Wind and Fire All Genuinely Happen Here

Spokane County gets three separate loading events that the west side mostly does not, and each one breaks trees differently:

• Glaze ice storms that coat every twig and take out whole crowns of brittle-wooded planted species — Siberian elm, green ash, black locust, silver maple in the older neighborhoods
• Cold-season windstorms that arrive fast and hit newly exposed edge trees hardest
• Summer thunderstorm downbursts, which drop trees in straight lines and surprise people who assume wind is a winter problem
• Wildfire in the interface around Dishman Hills, Mica Peak, the Palouse edge and the pine ground north of the river, where ladder fuels and doghair thickets built up through a century of suppression

That last item is why fuel reduction is the service we get asked for most in this county. On pine ground, the useful work is unglamorous: limb up, break the ladder from grass to crown, thin the overstocked pockets, and get the slash off the site rather than leaving it in piles against the tree line.

Cities and Communities in Spokane County

Choose your city below for the specifics — soils, exposure, the local species mix and what the jurisdiction expects before work starts.