American Outdoor Services

About American Outdoor Services

Iowa City doesn't look like the rest of the state from Melrose Avenue, where the street drops hard toward the river and the houses of Manville Heights climb the hillside above it in tiers. American Outdoor Services works those grades in winter, when a driveway pitched at the wrong angle turns into a sheet of glass overnight and a car left in it stays there until someone with a blade and a bag of salt gets to it. The crew treats every sloped drive as its own small problem — where the runoff collects, where the shade from a hillside oak keeps the ice longest — rather than running one pass over the whole neighborhood. Down at river level, the ground flattens out and the work gets simpler, walks and lots cleared in straighter lines and less time. It's a short drive between the two kinds of terrain, but the difference in what the job demands is real, and this crew works both sides of that hill in the same morning.