PRIVATE SECTOR, PUBLIC SERVICE:

Forestry and Fire Consulting and project work

Defensible space creation and FireWise property management

Tree climbing, thinning, falling, and removals

Restoration forestry and post-fire rehab

Chipping, pine needle cleanups, and fire fuels/debris hauling

Full service firewood – including campground bundles

Ask about other related services

 

 Services:

TREE SERVICES – With our experience in the trees, we can safely and efficiently handle your project, including wind-flow and canopy reductions, ”deadwooding” to remove unsightly limbs, and even complete removals and hazard eliminations. While our climber works overhead, the ground crew can be chipping the safely lowered material into our dump truck for fast and efficient disposal, and we will rake, sweep, and blow your yard back to the way we found it before arriving!

Or maybe you took down a tree yourself, and have a pile of limbs to deal with- why waste a whole Saturday hauling truckloads to the dump and paying for disposal by the cubic yard? We can chip 100 yards of limbs down to 10 yards of chips in a very short time, and won’t charge you for dumping it!

Don’t want the wood left over? We haul it away “off the clock” – at no charge to you. Or if you do want it, let us know how, and we can stay “on the clock” to buck, split, and stack it where you want it! And finally- ask about stump grinding!

DEFENSIBLE SPACE CREATION - In an emergency situation, fire crews have limited time and resources, and often need to make quick decision as to whether a home is can be saved or not. If you haven’t done defensible space work, they may write your home off at first glance. With extensive experience in real-life wildland-urban interface firefighting situations and training in structure protection, structural triage, and Firewise practices, we can take a look at your home and property with the eyes of a firefighter- but without the emergency mindset, and without you being evacuated first! Let’s work together to make your home safe from wildfire, just as hundreds have done with Running Tree before. We can help you comply with Oregon Senate Bill 360 and City Fire codes, but more importantly, we can help save your home!

RESTORATION FORESTRY - A great passion of ours is restoring the forest to a more sustainable, more natural,  healthier  state- a more beautiful, more fire-safe state. It’s no secret that Central  Oregon is primarily a  fire-dependent ecosystem, and neither is it secret that we  humans have changed the natural  order of things with logging, fire suppression, and  development. The thick stands of small  trees choked with brush that we see now are  not the way it used to be, when frequent, low-  intensity surface fires killed brush and  small trees and burned of tall grasses and pine needles.  We have an experienced and  well developed eye for retaining large, healthy trees,  encouraging smaller “leave  trees” to thrive, and managing for multiple values- balancing the needs of people,  wildlife, and plant life for the long-term, restoring your forest to a state more like it  was before we came along. Our treatments are clean, safe, and low-impact.

PRESCRIBED FIRE PLANNING

Prescribed Fire is one of the best tools available to us for effective, productive fuels management and forest restoration, but it takes experience and expertise to plan and manage correctly and safely, and requires good relationships with the US Forest Service, the Oregon Department of Forestry, the Department of Environmental Quality, and the local fire departments, and it requires the ability to write a thorough and complete burn plan prepared by a qualified Prescribed Fire Burn Boss. Consulting for Running Tree, Kirk Metzger meets all of these qualifications and exceeds all expectations, having planned and executed Rx fire on thousands of acres of public land at the USFS, directed burnout operations on wildland fire since 1972, and safely conducted (with GFP Enterprises staffing the fire crews) the first prescribed fires conducted in the the private sector in Central Oregon.

GOVERNMENT CONTRACTING AND GRANT PROGRAMS

With extensive experience working directly with and under contract to local fire departments,  Deschutes County, Crook County, the Oregon Department of Forestry, and the US Forest Service, we understand all of the ins and outs of the various local and state ordinances, requirements, and prohibitions, and know the right people to get your questions answered if we can’t answer them ourselves. In some cases, we can even help you apply for cost-sharing and grant monies set aside for wildland fire safety! Please check our ‘Past Projects’ page for details on some of Running Tree’s  successful performance in government contracting.

We do smaller jobs too! Pine needle cleanup, debris hauling, brush mowing, weed eating, firewood splitting – it doesn’t hurt to ask!

And last but not least, ask about FULL SERVICE FIREWOOD – split, delivered, stacked, and even bundled for camping if that is what you need!