Tree Service in Des Moines, WA

Des Moines drops about two hundred feet from Marine View Drive to the water, and that bluff decides most of what happens to trees here. First the plain fact: our shop is in Kelso, a little over two hours south on I-5. If a limb is hanging over your garage, a south King County company will serve you better than we can.

What justifies the drive is work that takes a crew several days — a stand coming off a lot ahead of a build, a crane set for trees with nowhere to fall, or a slope that has to be opened up deliberately rather than just cut.

What the Bluff Is Doing Under Your Lawn

The shoreline bluffs along this stretch of Puget Sound are layered, and the layering is the problem. Loose sand and gravel sit on dense glacial till and clay. Winter rain soaks down through the sand until it reaches the clay, then turns sideways and comes out of the bluff face as seeps. The face gives up a little at a time, usually late in a long wet stretch. A fir standing thirty feet back from the lip today is not standing thirty feet back forever.

That changes how we think about removals on the upper lots in Woodmont, Redondo and along Marine View. Taking the wrong tree off a bluff edge can cost you more soil than the tree ever threatened. Sometimes the honest answer is crown reduction with the root system left in the ground, and we have talked owners out of removals on exactly that reasoning.

Madrona and Fir Behave Differently on This Shoreline

Pacific madrona is the signature tree of the dry upper bluff, and the one homeowners most often kill by accident. It resents disturbed roots, summer irrigation and lawn creeping up to the trunk, and a stressed madrona will drop a heavy limb in still, dry weather with no wind to blame. Douglas fir on a bluff shoulder has the opposite habit: it grows one-sided into the light off the water, then carries that lopsided crown into a southwest gale.

View work is the other constant. Thirty years of growth closes a water view a foot at a time, and reopening it across a whole slope is a multi-day project rather than an afternoon — one of the few things in Des Moines that fits a crew traveling in. Windowing and crown reduction, never topping. Topping a fir above a bluff is how you manufacture the hazard tree you pay to remove eight years later.

Shoreline Parcels Come With Paperwork

Property near the water can fall under shoreline jurisdiction, geologically hazardous area rules, or both, and trees in the right-of-way along Marine View Drive are not the adjacent owner's to cut. Requirements differ between the city and the county and they change, so confirm with the City of Des Moines before anyone quotes the job, us included.

• Fresh seeps, slumps or bare scarps on the face below the tree
• Soil cracking or a lifted root plate on the uphill side of the trunk
• A crown that has grown out over the drop and never been reduced
• Fill, patios or downspouts pushing water toward the bluff edge
• Neighbors on the same contour who have already lost ground

Any of those and we want to walk the lot before quoting it. Estimates are free and on site. If it turns out to be a one-tree job a Burien or Federal Way crew can handle next week, you will hear that from us first.