Everyone plans the cutting — the tools, the weekend, who's doing what. Almost nobody plans the material afterwards, and that second job is bigger, more expensive and slower than the first. It's why half-finished mitigation sits on properties across this county all summer.
Yard and brush $119/cu yd · quarter truck $325 · full $985
Upload Photos & Get Quote →Worth being exact, because this is a subject where confident-sounding wrong information does real harm.
We're a hauling company. We are not fire professionals, and this page contains no guidance on how much to clear, how far from a structure, or what to prioritise.
That guidance exists and it comes from people qualified to give it — your local fire department, the county wildfire office, and your insurer, who may have their own requirements. It varies by property, vegetation, slope and jurisdiction, which is exactly why a hauling company shouldn't be summarising it.
What we know about is the second half: what happens once material is cut and lying on the ground. That's a genuine problem with real costs, and it's the part almost nobody budgets for.
The single most common misjudgement in this work.
Cut branches don't compact. A pile of slash is mostly air held apart by rigid, awkwardly-shaped material that refuses to nest — so the volume you're paying to move is close to the volume you can see, not the volume the wood would occupy if it were stacked timber.
People estimate slash by weight instinct and get it badly wrong. It's light, so it feels small; it's bulky, so it costs like something large. Yard and brush debris prices at $119 a cubic yard for exactly that reason.
The practical consequence: a morning's cutting can generate more material than a pickup will hold, and an afternoon's can exceed what most people imagined the whole project would produce. Photograph the pile before you assume.
On a wooded lot, this matters more than volume.
If a truck can reach the material, a large pile moves fast. If it can't, every cubic yard is carried by hand to wherever a vehicle can stand — and that distance becomes the job.
The situations that drive cost: material at the back of a treed acre; a slope between the pile and the driveway; a gate too narrow for a vehicle; soft ground that won't take a loaded truck; and mature trees that make the obvious route impossible.
So the most useful photograph you can send isn't the pile — it's the route from the pile to where a vehicle can park. That's the picture that tells us what the job actually is. Same principle as any access-limited removal.
And it's worth knowing before you cut. Where you stage the material is a decision, and staging it near vehicle access rather than where it fell is the cheapest thing you can do for yourself all day.
The one piece of planning that changes the number, and it costs nothing.
Material gets dropped where it's cut. That's natural and it's usually the wrong place — scattered across a slope, behind the structures, at the far edge of a lot.
If you can move it as you go, even roughly, toward the driveway or a spot a vehicle can reach, you convert the expensive part of the job into the part you were doing anyway. Dragging a branch twenty feet while you're already holding it is free; having someone carry it eighty feet later is not.
One consolidated pile beats six scattered ones, for the same reason. And leave a working gap around it so it can actually be loaded from more than one side.
A scheduling reality in wildland-urban-interface neighbourhoods.
Mitigation is seasonal work, and neighbours take their cues from each other. When one property on a road starts clearing, several more follow within a fortnight — which means demand for hauling in places like Black Forest, Cheyenne Cañon, Palmer Lake and Monument concentrates into short windows.
Book the removal when you book the cutting, not after you see the pile. The pile is predictable enough to arrange for in advance, and the alternative is slash sitting on your property while you wait for a slot.
Or arrange both for the same week. Plenty of people have a contractor cut and us collect a day or two behind, which keeps the property from spending a month as a staging yard.
Reliably more than brush, and this is the part that surprises people.
Clearing vegetation exposes what the vegetation was hiding. Old fencing, collapsed decking, a shed that's been quietly failing, tyres, scrap metal, offcuts, buckets, vehicle parts — a decade of things that went behind the treeline and stopped being visible.
None of that is yard waste and it doesn't price like yard waste. Construction debris — fence panels, decking boards, shed materials — is dense and prices at $162 a cubic yard. Tyres are $117 a set. Metal shelving is $95.
Photograph the non-brush finds separately when you ask for a quote. Mixed together they're one confusing picture; separated, they're two clear ones. Construction and demolition debris · the same sorting logic for a garage.
Stated plainly, because outbuildings are where this material lives.
Propane cylinders. Pressurised, and not something we'll carry. They turn up around sheds and old grills constantly.
Fuel, oil, solvents, pesticides and pool chemicals. Household hazardous waste, all of it, and a general facility won't take it either.
Find the local route in advance. We're not going to name a facility or a programme — we haven't verified one, and directing you somewhere on a guess would be worse than telling you to check. Sort this category out before your clearing day, because it's the one that leaves a job unfinished.
The boundary matters on this job more than most.
We don't fell trees, take down limbs, or work at height. That's a qualified arborist or a mitigation contractor with the training, the equipment and the insurance for it — genuinely hazardous work where the consequences of getting it wrong are severe.
We don't advise on what should be cut. See the top of this page.
What we do is arrive after all of that and make the material disappear, which is a narrower job than some companies claim and the one we can actually stand behind. Our brush and defensible-space removal service.
The most underused saving on this page, and it exists because of how the pricing works rather than as a favour.
A truck is priced by the load, not by the address. A full 16-cubic-yard truck is $985 whether it fills from one property or two adjacent ones — so two households clearing in the same week and consolidating to a single accessible pile are splitting one price instead of paying two.
That matters more here than it would in a suburb, because mitigation is inherently a shared-boundary problem. Vegetation does not stop at a property line, the material frequently ends up near one, and neighbours on a wooded road tend to be doing this work in the same fortnight anyway.
It also solves the access problem for whichever property has the worse route. If one driveway takes a truck comfortably and the other doesn't, staging both piles at the good access point is worth more than any pricing discussion.
Worth raising before you book, not after. We would rather send one truck to a shared pile than two trucks to two half-loads, and it is straightforwardly cheaper for both of you.
| Material or scope | Flat price |
|---|---|
| Minimum | $75 |
| Yard and brush debris | $119 / cu yd |
| Construction debris — fencing, decking, shed material | $162 / cu yd |
| Small pile | $110 |
| Medium pile | $174 |
| Large pile | $280 |
| Quarter truck | $325 |
| Half truck | $580 |
| Three-quarter truck | $790 |
| Full 16-cu-yd truck | $985 |
| Each additional truck | Same flat rate |
| Set of tyres | $117 |
| Metal shelving | $95 |
| Propane cylinders, fuel, chemicals | Not accepted |
No sales tax on the service in Colorado; quoted from photographs before anyone travels. Full price list.
A weekend's clearing on a treed lot, with the finds that came with it.
The brush: roughly six cubic yards of slash once piled, at $119 a cubic yard — $714.
The finds: a section of collapsed fencing and some rotten decking, about two cubic yards of construction debris at $162 — $324. Plus a set of tyres at $117.
Total $1,155 — and worth comparing against truck tiers, because at that combined volume a full load at $985 may well be the better number. We run both and quote the lower, which on mixed mitigation jobs usually means the truck rate. How the two methods compare across job shapes.
The point of the example isn't the total. It's that the brush was only about two thirds of it, and the owner had budgeted for brush.
$119 / cu yd. Photograph it — volume is routinely underestimated.
Consolidate first if you can. Carrying distance is the cost.
Send a photo of the route, not the pile.
Not us — arborist. Book separately.
$162 / cu yd, dense, not yard waste.
Construction debris. Photograph separately from the brush.
$117 a set — mention them when booking.
Separate it — a scrap collector may take it free. Free routes.
We can't take them. Find the local route.
Household hazardous waste. Sort before the day.
Multiple loads, same flat rate each. Full truck $985.
Book early. Demand concentrates into short windows.
Book the pile before you make it. The cutting is the part that gets planned — the weekend, the equipment, who is helping — and the material afterwards is treated as something that will sort itself out. It won't, and it is the larger job: slash does not compact, so the volume is close to what you can see; access decides the price far more than quantity does; and mitigation reliably uncovers a decade of fencing, tyres and scrap that nobody budgeted for. None of which is a reason to postpone the work. It is a reason to arrange the removal in the same conversation as the cutting, stage the material toward wherever a truck can stand, and settle the propane and chemicals in advance — so that when the cutting is finished, the job is actually finished, rather than becoming a pile you look at until autumn.
Photographs of the pile and the route back — flat price before anyone travels
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