Stump Grinding in Evadale, TX

Stump Grinding & Removal Services in Evadale, TX

Reopening an old timber road outside Evadale usually means dealing with the trees that grew up in it. Commercial forestry built roads across this country to carry loaded log trucks, and decades later many of them have grown in. An owner who clears one to use as a drive finds a line of stumps standing in a road bed that is otherwise still sound. Those stumps decide whether the reopened road holds up. Handled one way, they disappear. Handled the cheap way, they come back as potholes a few years later. The pine stump in a yard back in town is a simpler job, and it gets the same walk and the same written estimate.

Evadale sits where the Neches River bottom meets the piney woods, at the southern edge of the Big Thicket. The mill and the river made the town, and the land around it is working timber, hunting ground and rural acreage. The species run to mixed hardwood and pine rather than the tallow that dominates nearer the Gulf Coast, and much of the acreage has been through commercial forestry, some of it more than once. That harvest history left roads and skid trails behind. A timber road was laid out, built up and drained to carry heavy trucks, and the alignment and often a usable base are still under the regrowth. Reopening one is frequently cheaper than cutting new line through raw ground. Skid trails are a different thing. They are compacted tracks left from dragging logs, not built roads, and on a slope they channel water and start erosion. The uplands drain better than the clay south of here, which gives more working days in a year. The river bottom is another matter. Neches bottomland stays wet long after the high ground is workable, carries real wetland character, and can fall under Section 404 jurisdiction. Harvey put an enormous volume of water down this river system and Imelda followed two years later, and the bottoms are slow to give it back. Hunting and recreational tracts make up a large share of the acreage around Evadale. On that ground the stumps worth dealing with are the ones something will run over: the track out to a stand, a lane that gets mowed, a plot that gets worked. Elsewhere, mulching suits this country, since regrowth here is slower than on the tallow ground nearer the coast, and a mulching rotation leaves no burn piles in the middle of the woods. In town, yards carry the stumps of pine and hardwood shade trees taken down near houses. Pine does not resprout, so a ground pine stump stays gone. Hardwood stumps vary, and their surface roots can run a long way under a lawn.

On a reopened road, stumps in the travel way and the shoulders are pulled with the excavator and thumb, root plate attached. A stump ground off and left in a road bed rots, and the base over it drops into a pothole that keeps coming back however much rock goes in. Each hole is backfilled with suitable material and compacted in layers to match the road base around it. Where the road needs new surface or a crossing needs rebuilding, we deliver gravel and fill dirt as the job requires. Reopening the road usually takes more than the stumps. The crown has gone, crossings have silted or failed, and the surface has broken down, so the stump holes are filled as part of rebuilding the profile, and the road is shaped to shed water off its sides instead of down its length. Old skid trails are left out of the plan unless one is cutting a gully. The same rule applies under a house pad, a shop pad or a camp site. Anything built over a rotting root mass settles, so stumps inside those footprints come out with their roots, and the holes are compacted to carry what goes on top. Yard stumps are ground below grade once public lines are located through 811. Private lines, such as the well, the septic and any feed to a shop, are walked with you. The chips go back in the hole, onto beds or onto the truck, and where grass is wanted, topsoil goes in and the spot is leveled. Root balls and grindings on a wooded tract are mulched, hauled off, or burned where TCEQ outdoor burning rules and the county's position at the time allow. Nothing is buried. Work on the uplands can run through more of the year than on coastal clay. Work anywhere near the bottom is scheduled around the river, not just the week's forecast.