Tree Service in Olympic West, WA

Olympic West filled in after the war, on the last flat ground before town starts climbing toward Columbia Heights. Single-story houses, attached garages, modest lots, and a landscape planted almost entirely out of a nursery catalog. The species picked back then were picked for how fast they filled in, not for how they would age.

The Nursery Catalog Is Coming Due

• Birch, thin through the top and shedding bark, stressed by dry Augusts and finished off by borers
• Colorado blue spruce losing needles from the bottom up until there is a bare pole under a green hat
• Silver maple planted for quick shade, now well over a single-story roofline with unions that split in still air
• Lombardy poplar screens along the back fence, cankered and dying about on schedule
• Flowering plum and cherry at the natural end of a short life, dropping limbs onto cars in the driveway
• Arborvitae hedges splayed open by one wet snow and never right since
• And the Douglas fir somebody set in three feet off the foundation as a seedling

Roughly half of that list is still fixable and half is not. Sorting which is which is most of what an estimate out here is actually for.

There Are No Alleys on This Side of Town

The old Long-Bell blocks got an alley behind every house. Out here the streets curve, the garages are attached, and the way into a backyard is a side gate about a yard wide with the gas meter beside it. That one detail sets the price of most removals in Olympic West. Brush gets hand-carried through the side yard, or the wood goes up and over the roof on a crane parked in the street. There is no third option, and no photo will tell us which it is.

The drop zone is usually full too. Heat pumps, sheds, above-ground pools, greenhouses and a neighbor’s fence all sit inside the circle, so every piece gets rigged around something.

Edge Trees That Did Not Used to Be Edge Trees

The failure that catches people here comes after a neighbor takes something out. A fir that spent fifty years in the middle of a sheltered block grows a crown suited to that shelter and not much taper in the trunk to go with it. Clear the two trees upwind of it and it is suddenly standing on the edge of an opening, taking wind it has never had to handle. That one tends to come down a season or two later, by which point nobody connects the two events. If a big conifer near you has just come out, it is a sensible moment to have yours looked at.