Braddock Hills sits high, and so do its trees

The lip of the ravine is where the work is

Walk the back edge of a Braddock Hills property and you will usually find the same picture. Lawn, then a fence or a row of shrubs, then the ground simply leaves, dropping into a wooded slope that runs down toward the valley floor. The trees standing right on that lip are the ones we get called about most, and they behave differently from a tree in the middle of a yard. Half their crown has nothing but open air on the downhill side, so that is where they put their growth. Year after year the trunk answers by leaning out over the drop and loading its weight in one direction.

That lean is not automatically a problem. Trees have been doing it on these slopes forever and plenty of them are sound. What matters is what happens at the root plate, because the soil on a ravine shoulder is thin, it moves downhill a little at a time, and heavy spring rain will loosen the uphill side of the plate that is holding all that leaning weight. When one of these does go, it goes outward and downward, away from the house, which sounds like good news right up until it takes the fence, the retaining wall and forty feet of your neighbor’s slope with it.

Working a ravine-lip tree means the drop is not a place we can put anything. So the rigging goes the other way. We set lines to bring pieces back uphill onto the lawn instead of letting gravity have them, which is slower and takes more hands, and it is why a ravine-lip removal looks like a bigger production than a comparable tree out front. It is also the difference between a clean job and a mess strung down a hillside nobody can climb back into. When the ground allows it we drop the wood on grass, chip on the driveway, and the slope never gets touched.

The plateau has its own list. The borough filled in during the postwar years with brick ranches and split-levels, and the shade trees that went in with those houses are now in their sixties and seventies. That is late middle age for a maple and getting on for a lot of the ash and pin oaks. They shed limbs on the interior first, they carry deadwood you cannot see from the ground, and they need weight taken off before the next real wind rather than after. A proper pruning visit on a tree that age buys years, and it is honestly the most useful money spent in this borough.

Then there is the wind itself. Up here there is no ridge upwind to break anything, which is why plateau windthrow is a regular call for us after a summer front rolls through. The trees that come over tend to be the ones with room around them, the open-grown yard specimens that never had to compete and so never built much taper in the trunk. Storm calls run around the clock, and we work Braddock Hills the same as every borough across Allegheny County, except that a borough this compact means we are on your street fast and finished before the day is out.

Stumps are worth deciding about before we ever start cutting. A ranch lot up here is mostly flat, open and mowed, so a stump left behind sits right in the middle of everything you use, and you will be steering around it every week from April to October. Grinding it out the same afternoon costs a fraction of what a return trip would, and the crew is already parked in the driveway with the machine on the trailer. Out at the ravine edge the calculation changes, because a stump on the shoulder is doing something useful holding soil together, and sometimes the right answer is to cut it low and leave the root system where it is. We will say which it is when we look at the ground.

Being a small borough cuts both ways, and mostly in your favor. There is no crew that lives here full time, so anyone working a Braddock Hills tree is coming in from somewhere, and plenty of outfits will make you wait until they have enough work up the hill to justify the drive. We do not run it that way. If your street is on the schedule you get a real window, the truck shows up inside it, and the whole job goes start to finish in one visit rather than in three appointments spread across a month. Small streets also mean we plan the parking before we arrive, because on some of these blocks the chipper and the dump trailer need a spot worked out ahead of time rather than sorted at seven in the morning while your neighbors are trying to leave for work.