Tree Removal in Salt Lake City, UT

Tree removal in Salt Lake City usually means taking a mature tree apart from the top down. Older neighborhoods were planted generations ago, and a silver maple, Siberian elm or blue spruce that started as a sapling beside a 1920s bungalow can now be 60 feet tall and hanging over two roofs. A climber works up the tree, cuts limbs in manageable pieces and lowers heavy sections on ropes, and the trunk follows in rounds. On open ground a tree can sometimes be felled in one piece, but that is the exception here.

Signs a tree should come out

Some cases are clear: a tree that is dead, a trunk with a long crack or a cavity, mushrooms or soft wood at the base, a new lean with soil heaved up on one side, or a spruce that has lost most of its needles from the bottom up. Others take judgment. A tree with iron chlorosis may recover if the watering changes; one with cytospora canker on a few branches may only need those branches pruned out. USU Extension notes that cytospora is a weak parasite that attacks stressed trees and that no fungicide controls it once it is inside, so a tree with cankers spreading through the main trunk rarely turns around. We tell you which group your tree is in.

Elms, borers and dead wood

USU Extension lists American, Siberian and English elm among the trees elm bark beetles attack, and it advises removing elms infested with elm bark beetles and debarking the wood before the adults emerge in May and June, because beetles from dead or dying elms can carry Dutch elm disease to nearby trees. Trees attacked by flatheaded borers, which USU says go after drought-stressed trees, show oval exit holes and loose, dead bark. Dead wood of any species dries and turns brittle, which makes climbing and rigging less predictable, so a dead tree near the house is cheaper and safer to remove sooner.

Park strip trees are a separate case

If the tree is between the sidewalk and the curb, or in the city right-of-way on a street with no park strip, it is almost certainly a city tree. Salt Lake City Urban Forestry requires a permit before anyone removes it and treats removal as a last resort; it generally won't approve removal just because roots lift a sidewalk or the tree is messy. Call Urban Forestry at (801) 972-7818 first. We flag this on the first visit so you don't pay for a quote on a tree you can't legally touch.

Wires, roofs and fences

We don't cut near energized lines. Rocky Mountain Power handles line clearance and will arrange a free temporary disconnect of the service line to your house when tree work requires it. Over roofs, limbs are tied off and swung clear rather than dropped. Where a branch must come over a fence or a neighbor's garage, we talk it through with you before the day of the job.

What happens to the wood and stump

Brush goes through a chipper. Logs can stay as rounds, be cut to firewood length or be hauled off. The stump is listed separately on the quote; grinding it the same day saves a second trip.