Avalon trees come down piece by piece

A borough on a grade

Avalon runs a long strip between the Ohio River and the hill behind it. California Avenue holds the flat, and every street that leaves it goes up. Some of them go up steeply enough that the driveway is a ramp and the garage is cut straight into the bank under the house. Lots are small, the houses sit close, and the back of the property is often four or five feet higher than the front. Nice place to live. Complicated place to run a saw.

The slope is the first thing Chris looks at when he walks a job here. On level ground you can control a piece with a rope and a decent anchor point. On a grade, whatever you cut wants to keep going after it lands, and downhill of it is usually a fence, a retaining wall, a parked car on the street, or somebody’s back porch. So the rigging changes. We tie pieces off shorter, take smaller sections, use a second line to steer the load, and land things on a mat instead of on the hillside. It is slower. It is also the reason we do not leave dents in your yard or gouges in the wall your grandfather poured.

The wood then has to travel uphill or down to reach the truck, and that is its own piece of the day. Sometimes the route is a set of concrete steps. Sometimes it is a rear alley barely wide enough for the chip truck. We plan the haul-out before the first cut, because a log that is easy to make is not always easy to move, and there is no point creating a pile you cannot get to the street.

Wires complicate the grade further. Overhead lines thread nearly every block up here, and on a hillside street they sit at a different height relative to the tree on each end of the same span. A limb that clears the line by ten feet at the top of the block can be brushing it two houses down. We look at each drop individually, tell you plainly what belongs to the utility and what belongs to us, and neither guess nor cut near anything energized without knowing which is which.

As for what is actually growing here, the borough’s street plantings tell the age of the place. London planes and sycamores stand along the avenue and the older cross streets, their mottled bark peeling in sheets, roots working under the sidewalk slabs. Norway maples fill in the curb strips on the residential blocks. Both are city-tough trees that were put in for shade and have delivered on it for decades. Both also outgrow the four-foot strip of dirt they were given, and by the time a plane tree’s crown is over the road and the wires and the parked cars at once, it needs regular attention rather than one big cut.

Back yards are a different animal. Behind the houses you find the trees nobody planted on purpose, or planted too close to the fence sixty years ago, and a lot of those are aging silver maples. They grow fast, they get tall, they hold weight badly on the ends of long limbs, and they are the tree most likely to drop something across a shed roof in a July storm. A silver maple on a small hillside lot with three properties inside its drop zone is our most common removal call in this borough.

Not every one has to go, and we will say so. Plenty of these trees are structurally sound and simply carrying too much end weight and twenty years of deadwood. Taking that out and shortening the long limbs makes the tree safer and lets it keep doing its job. Where a street tree is one-sided from leaning out over the road for light, we reduce the heavy side and let it even out over a couple of seasons. Care first is cheaper for you and better for the block.

Timing helps on a slope more than most people expect. Late fall and winter are the best window for rigging work here, because the leaves are down and the climber can actually see the wires, the structure, and the ground below. The pieces weigh less without foliage, there is nothing planted underneath to protect, and firm ground carries logs without rutting. If the tree is not an emergency, a February date usually buys you a cleaner job and a shorter wait.

When it is an emergency, none of that applies. A limb across the wires or a trunk split at eleven at night is an emergency call, and the phone gets answered. We make it safe first, document what happened for your insurance, and handle the full cleanup on a schedule that suits you. Same crew, same standard we hold everywhere in Allegheny County.

One thing worth saying plainly, since it is what most people are bracing for: Chris walks the property himself, looks at what is actually in front of him, and tells you what has to come out, what can wait a few years, and what only needs a trim. If a tree is fine, you will hear that too. The number comes in writing before anybody starts, it does not move on the day of the job, and the crew does not pull out until the yard is raked, the alley is clear, and the gate is shut behind us.