The work
A tree is the slowest thing on the property — and the one most worth getting right.
A big tree doesn't ask much. A few good cuts a decade, a clear look after a storm, someone who knows the difference between a limb that's heavy and a limb that's failing. Get those right and it stands for another generation. Get them wrong and one of them comes down on a roof.
That's the whole job at Joe Skillen Tree Services: reading the tree before touching it. The lean, the union where two leaders meet, the deadwood up high, the targets below — the house, the line, the kids' trampoline. We make the plan on the ground, then we make the cut.
"We'd rather spend twenty minutes looking at a tree than two minutes guessing at it."
Across Chilliwack and the valley that means pruning that keeps a tree healthy instead of just smaller, removals rigged down piece by piece over a tight backyard, stumps ground out so you get your ground back, and a site raked clean before the truck leaves. The trees that can be saved, we save. The ones that can't, we take down safely.
After a Fraser Valley windstorm the phone is for the trees that didn't make it — the split leader, the limb hung up in the canopy, the trunk leaning on the fence. We make it safe first, then we clean it up, then we tell you straight what the rest of the tree has left.