Tree Service in Lewisville, WA

Take the Lewisville Highway north out of Battle Ground and the ground steps down toward the East Fork Lewis: pasture on the terrace, then a strip of big cottonwood and alder along the water, then gravel bar. Almost every call we get here comes out of one of those three bands, and they are not the same job.

Cottonwood Is the Tree That Costs Lewisville the Most

Black cottonwood owns this river bottom. It grows faster than anything else in the county, gets genuinely huge, and pays for that speed with weak wood. A mature cottonwood will throw a full-size limb on a still summer afternoon with no storm involved at all. The dead tops go first, then the big laterals, and by the time one looks rough from the ground it has usually been shedding pieces for years.

It also hollows from the inside while the crown still looks full and green. Cavity nesters and ants find these trees early, and a trunk you cannot see into is a trunk nobody should guess about. If you have cottonwood standing within its own height of a house, a shop, the driveway or where people park, that is the tree to deal with first — ahead of the fir everybody worries about.

One thing to plan on: nobody wants cottonwood for firewood. It is wet, heavy and it burns fast and dirty, so unlike fir or maple there is no neighbor lining up to haul the rounds off your field. The wood is part of the job here rather than a bonus at the end of it, and we will say how we intend to handle it before you agree to anything.

What High Water Does to a Root Plate

The East Fork is a gravel-bed river and it moves. A hard December flow scours one bank and builds a bar on the other, and the alder line that looked settled in September can be hanging over open water by March. Trees along here mostly do not fail because they got sick. They fail because the ground they were standing in went downstream.

• How far the bank has moved since you bought the place, as best you can remember
• Roots exposed on the water side, or a root plate overhanging a cut bank
• A lean that has increased since the last high-water winter
• Fresh scour, undercutting or slumping at the toe of the bank
• Where the tree ends up if the bank gives — the water, the pasture, or the house

Season matters more here than anywhere else we work. Late summer and early fall, with low water and firm ground, is when equipment can actually get near a bank without tearing it up or sinking. In February that same spot will not carry a loaded truck, and we would rather tell you to wait six weeks than pretend otherwise and leave you with ruts and a repair bill.

Dropping a Tree Beside the Lewisville Highway

State Route 503 carries real traffic through here and plenty of properties front it. A tree that has to come over a highway shoulder is not a bigger tree, it is a different job. Pieces get rigged and lowered instead of felled, the work gets staged so nothing sits in a travel lane, and if the road needs controlling that gets arranged ahead of the day rather than improvised on it. Same story for the wires strung along the road: any conductor in a tree is a Clark Public Utilities call before it is ours.

Riverfront Rules Are Real, and They Change

Property along the East Fork can sit inside shoreline jurisdiction, a riparian buffer or a mapped critical area, and what you may cut near the water is not the same as what you may cut a hundred yards back on the terrace. Those rules differ by jurisdiction and they get revised, so we do not quote them from memory and no contractor should. We check what applies to your parcel while we are out there, tell you what we found, and point you to the county if a permit or a written report is the honest next step. That is a better afternoon than finding out after the saws have run.