Large Tree Removals in Fairfax and How to Avoid Them!

Fairfax has a pretty wide variety of trees, but the usually suspects are white oak, red oak, and tulip poplar when it comes to tree removal jobs. Those are probably the three most common indigenous trees to Fairfax County. It's a very similar species list to other places in northern Virginia.

We really excel in large tree removal because we have the right skill set in our teams for that type of work as compared to other firms. Of course, we're also very skilled at hand pruning smaller trees, again because of the skill set of our arborists.

Having certified arborists do your tree trimming is equally important as for tree removal, and in some ways it can be much more technical. A tree trimmer should not wear climbing spikes. They're referred to as gaffs, the hooks that we put on a tree when we're climbing a tree that we know we're going to be removing. When we're pruning a tree, we don't wear them, and people should not wear them when trimming. That means we need to get ourselves around the canopy of a tree without the aid of those spikes. Most of our climbers prefer to climb without spikes because they're competition climbers and that's just how they train. It's how they learn. They're climbers first and take down guys second. Spikes are uncomfortable. If you wear them all day, they kind of hurt your legs, and they're a little bit cumbersome because you can trip over them. So, imagine when you're crawling around in a tree, it's much better to wear boots that are grippy and nimble.

I know a lot of climbers at other companies that prefer to wear spikes, because that's the only way they know to go on a tree. There are really good climbers in our industry who only climb with spikes. That's the only thing they do, but a more well rounded climber usually will prefer to climb without the spikes because they can get up a tree faster than a guy on spikes.

Tree trimmers wearing spikes used to be shockingly common, as recently as 5 to 10 years ago. Now, the public has become more educated, so it's frowned upon a lot more in trimming and pruning situations. If I had to guess, I would say 30% of companies out there still do it. That's based on the amount of spike holes we see on trees throughout the region. We can see the spike wounds, and spike wounds, no matter what an uneducated tree climber will tell you, will not heal on a tree because they occur in places where the tree doesn't expect to be wounded. They take years and years to heal if they ever heal at all.

We have removed trees because spike wounds caused eventual stem decay. We don't advocate trimming trees without wearing spikes just to be snooty. It's a very serious issue!