Emerald Landscaping | Free Estimate | Steilacoom

About Emerald Landscaping | Free Estimate | Steilacoom

Steilacoom is one of Washington's first towns, and its streets still run past Territorial-era houses set back on a bluff that drops straight to the Sound, with the ferry dock below carrying cars out to Anderson Island whatever the weather does. A snowfall here is rare and usually brief — a few wet inches off a cold front pushing down from the north — but when it does come, laying over those old front lawns and porch steps, it turns the whole bluff into something out of an older photograph. Emerald's crew clears those walks and driveways carefully, working around gardens laid in decades ago and steps worn smooth by generations of foot traffic, salting the pitched paths down toward the water so the incline doesn't turn into a slide. Down at the ferry landing, the lot gets first priority — commuters and islanders alike need a clear path to the dock no matter what the sky's doing. There's something fitting about clearing snow in the oldest town in the state, working the same short streets that have been shoveled by hand since long before there were trucks to do it. By the time the ferry makes its first run, the walk up from the dock is bare, and the bluff looks, for a morning, like it always has.