Heilman Services (Vegetation Management)

About Heilman Services (Vegetation Management)

Heilman spends most of the year cutting sightlines back from the shoulders of Highway 101 and the roads that branch off it toward the Elwha, keeping the salmonberry and alder from swallowing a guardrail whole by August, and that same crew and the same mowing rigs are what the county calls when a January storm needs snow pushed off those same shoulders before brush crews can even get back to summer work. The Elwha corridor west of town has changed since the dams came out — young cottonwood and willow filling in where reservoir mud used to sit — and a wet, heavy snow out there behaves differently than it does downtown, bending brush low across a lane instead of just piling on pavement. Clearing it means the crew's often doing two jobs in one pass: pushing snow and cutting back whatever it flattened underneath. The highway itself gets salted and plowed by the state, but the pullouts, trailheads, and side roads feeding it are where Heilman's rigs go to work. It's roadside work done in whatever weather shows up, unnoticed until the day a blocked shoulder backs up every truck behind it on a highway this narrow.