Tree Removal in Sour Lake, TX

Tree Removal & Trimming Services in Sour Lake, TX

Around Sour Lake a tree usually has room to fall, and that changes the job. Most of what we take down here is on acreage: fence lines gone to tallow, a water oak in the middle of a hay meadow, the pecans and live oaks that were planted around a homestead long before the current owner bought it. The climbers still ride along for the trees over the house and the barn, but a lot of Sour Lake tree work is machine work, and it tends to be the first day of a bigger job. Seventeen miles west of us on Highway 105, in the corner of Hardin County that sits on a salt dome and an old oil field, is also ground where we look down before we look up.

The Sour Lake field came in shortly after Spindletop, and the tracts around town still carry it: old lease roads built up above the pasture, well pads, tank battery sites and pipeline right of way running in straight lines through what looks like ordinary grazing land. On a tree job that matters in a way it does not in town. A tree cannot be felled across an active right of way without the operator's say, a stump cannot be pulled where a flowline might be, and an excavator pushing a tree over with its root plate attached is pulling up whatever is under that root plate. So we walk the drop zone and the route before we cut, we ask what the owner knows about the property's history, and where there is any doubt we get locates first. The trees themselves are the county's usual mix. Chinese tallow has taken every fence line and the edges of every pasture that stopped being grazed, and it comes back from the roots, so cutting it is the start of a grubbing job rather than a tree job. Water oak and pecan stand in the meadows where they were left for shade, and the old ones are hollowing. Around the homesteads there are live oaks that have earned their keep and that nobody wants gone, which is where reduction rather than removal comes in. North of town the ground rises toward the Big Thicket and the pine starts, and south and east it drains through Pine Island Bayou toward the Neches, with bottomland along the sloughs that stays wet and that often should be left as it stands. Rural cuts both ways. There are fewer neighbors under the tree and more room to work, which keeps a Sour Lake take-down simpler than the same tree in Beaumont. But the drives are long and the crossings are old, and getting a loaded trailer of trunk sections back out to Highway 105 has to be checked before the day. After a hurricane the distance works against you: Rita, Ike, Harvey and Laura all put trees across drives out here, and the utility's line crews reach the rural end of the county in their own time. A tree on a line waits for them however long that is.

On open ground a Sour Lake tree gets felled with a directional cut, or, on land that is being cleared anyway, pushed over by the excavator so the root plate comes with it and there is no stump to deal with afterward. The trunk is bucked where it lies and loaded, the brush goes on the trailer, and the tract is left clean rather than with a burn pile waiting for a Hardin County burn ban to lift. Where a tree stands over the house, the barn or the equipment shed, the climber goes up and rigs it down in pieces, same as in town. Stump grinding is available with a removal, and on pasture the stumps usually come out with the root plate rather than being ground, which our stump removal page explains. Because so much of the wood off a Sour Lake job is hardwood, this is where a good share of our firewood comes from: the water oak and pecan out of a pasture reclaim, bucked and sold as mixed hardwood, seasoned or green, delivered inside the service area or picked up by arrangement, quoted per load when you call. If you want your own wood left, say so and we buck it and leave it. Topping gets asked for on the homestead trees, and we will do it when you want it, but on a live oak or a pecan you plan to keep we will show you where crown reduction, cutting to a lateral limb instead of a stub, gets the height down without the weak regrowth. Storm damage is prioritized and the phone is answered around the clock. A storm tree that is bowed or hung is under tension and is not a homeowner's saw job, and a tree on or near a line is the utility's before it is ours; we do not promise arrival times, we tell you where you stand in the line.