Tree Service in Headquarters, WA

Some of the most useful conversations we have out here end with us not taking the job, usually for the same reason: the tree somebody is worried about is not on their land.

The Tree Over Your Roof May Not Be Your Tree

On the edges of company and state ground this comes up constantly. Somebody has a big fir leaning at the house, we walk out to it, and the trunk turns out to be well the wrong side of a line. We will not cut it. A tree belongs to whoever owns the ground its trunk sits in, and cutting across a boundary on a guess at where the corner is turns a tree problem into a legal one.

What works instead is unglamorous. Find out who owns the ground — the county assessor parcel map is public. Contact them in writing and keep a dated copy. Timber managers and state land staff do respond to a documented hazard aimed at a house, though not on your timeline. You can generally cut what crosses onto your side, though hacking a conifer back to a line rarely makes it safer.

We Are a Tree Crew, Not a Logging Outfit

The two get mixed up out here more than anywhere else we work. If you have acreage of merchantable timber you want turned into money, you want a logging contractor and probably a consulting forester — they have the equipment and the market access, and you will come out ahead with them. We would rather say that on the phone.

What we handle is the trees that cannot be allowed to fall wrong. The fir over the roofline. The leaner across the only road in. The dead cedar shedding bark onto a propane tank. Those come down in pieces on a rope, in a yard people have to live in the next morning, priced by the day rather than by the load. Once a job starts looking like a harvest instead of yard work, forest practices rules can come into it, and those change — check with DNR for your parcel first.

Slash, Landings and the Ground Right Around the Buildings

A good share of what we do at this end of the county is not removal at all. Old landings and skid roads grow back to alder and blackberry within a few seasons. Slash from somebody else’s project sits and cures. Brush walks in toward the shop a foot a year until the truck folds its mirrors to get past. That is chipper and grinder work, easy to price once we have walked it.

The part people put off is the ring of ground right around the buildings. Southwest Washington summers run dry more often than newcomers expect, and a house with cured slash piled near it, dead lower limbs on the surrounding fir and blackberry underneath has an unbroken run of fuel leading to the siding. Limbing up close to the structures and getting the piles out is cheap work by comparison.

• Hazard trees over houses, shops, wellheads and access roads
• Storm work — trees on structures or lying across the only way out
• Alder, blackberry and brush reclaiming landings, skid roads and fence lines
• Slash removal and fuel reduction around buildings
• Stump grinding where a pad, a drive or a fence line has to be usable again

Same County, Same Phone Number

Our shop is on Mt Pleasant Road in Kelso, and for a place like this that is the whole pitch. No travel charge anywhere in Cowlitz County, estimates free and done standing on your ground, and when a hard south wind comes through we are already inside the county rather than deciding from three hours off whether the drive pencils out. Being close also changes what is worth doing: a single leaner or one stump in a pad is a half-day job an outfit driving in from further out has every reason to decline. Bring us the small one and we will schedule it.