Tree Service in Mt. Solo, WA

Drive out Ocean Beach Highway and Mt. Solo is the one thing that interrupts the horizon. Everything west of Longview is flat, diked, drained bottomland, and then this hill stands up out of it alone. That is not scenery as far as our work goes.

A Hill With Nothing Standing In Front Of It

A south or southwest storm crosses open pasture and dike for a long way before it reaches anything solid, and the first solid thing is this slope. Trees on the windward face and the crest take the full load with no neighbors upwind to break it up. That is why the tree that goes over here is so often the biggest, healthiest fir on the property.

The failure signature is usually the whole tree rather than a limb. The root plate lifts, the ground on the uphill side cracks open in an arc, and the lean deepens after every wet spell until one night it finishes the job. A fresh crack or a heaved mound of turf at the base of something big is worth a look before the next system comes through.

Rock Near the Top, Wet Silt at the Bottom

The other half of the story is underground. Up on the shoulder and the crest, soil over rock is thin, so roots run wide and shallow instead of deep, and by late August the south face is genuinely dry. Western red cedar shows it first — brown flagging in the top, dieback people mistake for disease when it is really a rooting-depth problem.

At the toe of the slope the ground stays saturated most of the winter and grows an entirely different set of trees. Two properties three hundred yards apart can need opposite work, which is why we would rather walk both than guess at either.

• Wind-thrown and leaning firs on the exposed west and south faces
• Cedar with dieback in the top from thin soil and late-summer drought
• Storm work after south-wind events, including trees down across the hill road
• Crown reduction and windowing to reopen views over the river toward Oregon
• Clearing volunteer alder, maple and blackberry off the steeper unbuildable ground
• Stump grinding on slopes where the machine has to be walked in rather than driven

The Road Up Decides What the Job Looks Like

Access is the constraint here more often than the tree is. The routes up are narrow and they bend, and plenty of the driveways off them are steep gravel with a bank on one side and no turnaround at the top. A chip truck that goes up a drive it cannot back down is a bad afternoon for everybody. Sometimes brush gets carried out to a rig parked on the flat, sometimes a crane sets low and lifts the wood over the roofline.