Can you take down a dead pine right next to my house in Cobb?

Yes. When there is no room to drop it, the crew climbs it from the spider lift and lowers it in sections, so nothing lands on the roof. Robert looks at it with you first and gives you a price before any work starts.

Do I need a permit to cut trees on my Cobb property?

Cobb is unincorporated, so check with the County of Lake before work starts. As a CalFire Licensed Timber Operator, Robert can talk you through what to ask.

Tree Service in Cobb, CA

Our home mountain

Cobb sits along Highway 175 at about 2,600 feet, on the slopes of Cobb Mountain, the tallest peak in the Mayacamas range at 4,723 feet. The Geysers geothermal field lies just to the south, and Boggs Mountain Demonstration State Forest, run by CAL FIRE, is next door. Up here you live among conifers: Douglas fir, ponderosa pine and sugar pine, with black oak, canyon live oak and madrone mixed in.

That is why so many Cobb calls are about tall trees close to a house on a sloped lot. A dying pine leaning over a cabin roof, a fir with a split top above the driveway, a row of trees shading a deck that you want opened up. For the ones too close to the house to fell whole, our tree removal crew takes them down in pieces from the tracked spider lift.

Where R2 started

The Valley Fire started near Cobb on September 12, 2015. It burned about 76,000 acres, destroyed 1,955 structures across south Lake County, and took many of the homes in Cobb. On Boggs Mountain it killed about 80 percent of the mature trees. After the fire came the bark beetles and a mountain of dead wood.

In 2022, about seven years after the fire, Robert was asked to assist in operating a CAL FIRE pilot program feeding beetle-kill pine logs into an air curtain incinerator, and it bothered him to watch good wood burn. That is where R2’s full circle comes from: wood goes to our own sawmill and comes back as lumber or a shed, and the scraps turn into wood mulch and soil. If your lot still has standing dead trees or old piles from the fire, land clearing and defensible space work take care of both.

Snow on the mountain

Cobb gets snow most winters, and heavy wet snow is hard on trees. Limbs snap, and pines in soaked ground can tip. A few years ago a storm left trees on roughly 50 homes around here, and Robert’s crew pulled them off before the company owned the gear it has now. Today the yard has a tracked spider lift, a chipper and an excavator, and the phone is answered 24 hours, 7 days. See storm and emergency work.

What R2 Does in Cobb

Nearby: Loch Lomond, Middletown, Kelseyville.