Tree Service in Whitman County, WA

Whitman County grows more wheat than trees and always has. Native woody cover was limited to draws and creek bottoms — hawthorn, water birch, cottonwood, a little aspen — plus the odd conifer stand hanging on the cool north face of Kamiak Butte. Everything else came out of planting decisions made a long time ago, and mostly all at once.

Deep Loess and Steep Ground

These hills are windblown silt, piled deep and pitched at angles that surprise people who have only seen them in photographs. Loess is superb farm soil and mediocre anchorage. There is no coarse fragment for roots to lock around, it holds water through spring, and on a steep face the whole profile creeps downhill under its own weight.

In practice that means trees on Palouse slopes lean, and the lean is often not a defect you can prune out — it is the ground moving. It also means the risky window here is a saturated March or April, not the middle of a storm season. A tree that has stood through forty summers of dry wind can go over on a still day when the soil finally lets go of the plate.

One Planting Era, One Failure Era

Colfax, Palouse, Tekoa, Rosalia, Oakesdale, Garfield, St. John, Colton and Uniontown were built in a hurry and planted in a hurry. Around them went the farmstead windbreaks — Lombardy poplar, black locust, Siberian elm, blue spruce, Austrian pine — set out around homesteads and again under Depression-era conservation programs. The result is a county-wide tree population of roughly one age, and that age is old.

Poplar and locust do not grow old gracefully in this climate. They shed large limbs with little warning, carry decay down from old topping cuts, and were planted in rows, which is why the work arrives in units of eight or ten rather than one. Pullman is the exception: the university campus and the hills around it hold a wider and better-tended collection, on steeper and tighter access than anywhere else in the county.

Fire Here Runs on Grass, Not Timber

The fire problem in Whitman County is not a crown fire in a forest. It is cured grass, stubble and roadside fuel moving fast in front of a September wind, and it can take a shelterbelt, a farmstead and a small town in an afternoon. The Labor Day 2020 windstorm fires that burned much of Malden and Pine City made that point to everyone who lives out here.

Defensible space in this county mostly means separating a house from its own windbreak — pulling the dead poplar and locust out of the row, opening the spacing, cutting the ladder fuel down and hauling the debris off the place instead of piling it at the edge of a field.

• Farmstead windbreak thinning and full shelterbelt removals
• Multi-tree removals in Colfax, Palouse, Tekoa and the smaller towns
• Lot and site clearing on slopes too steep for a small crew and a pickup
• Written risk assessments for school districts, granges and commercial owners
• Fuel reduction between a house and the rows planted around it

Towns We Cover in Whitman County

Pullman and Colfax anchor the county, but a lot of the work sits in the smaller places — Palouse, Tekoa, Rosalia, Garfield, Oakesdale, St. John, Colton, Uniontown, Endicott and LaCrosse. Pick the one nearest your ground.