Tree Inspections Before Colorado Storm Season: What to Check and When

Introduction

Tree inspections matter most before the first heavy load event of the year, and in Colorado that is usually wet spring snow rather than summer wind, which puts the useful inspection window in late winter while the canopy is still bare and structure is visible.

That timing runs against the common advice to inspect in late spring or early summer "before storm season." Western Colorado does not have one storm season. It has several distinct load events spread across the year, they stress trees in different ways, and the one most likely to take limbs off is also the one people prepare for least.

The other gap in the usual advice is what an inspection actually consists of. "Have a professional look at your trees" is not useful if a homeowner cannot tell a genuine assessment from a walk past the trunk. Knowing what should be examined, what the findings mean, and which defects are worth correcting turns an inspection from a service call into a decision. Where the answer is corrective work, tree trimming that reduces weight and removes failure prone limbs is usually the intervention, and it needs to happen before the weather tests anything.

This article covers when to inspect, what the inspection can and cannot detect, what you can check yourself from the ground, and which common storm prep measures make trees weaker rather than stronger.

Colorado Does Not Have One Storm Season

Treating storm preparation as a single annual task misses most of the risk. Trees around Grand Junction, Clifton, Fruita, Redlands, and Montrose face at least five distinct stress events.

Wet spring snow, roughly March into April. This is the most destructive one for limbs, and it is underestimated constantly. Fruit and ornamental trees leaf out early in the valley. A heavy wet snow landing on a fully leafed canopy multiplies the load far beyond what the same snowfall would do in January. Weak unions and overextended limbs go first.

Spring and early summer wind. Sustained wind and gusts find every defect. This is when cracked unions and previously damaged limbs tend to finish failing.

Hail. Hail rarely takes a tree down but strips foliage, wounds bark, and leaves entry points for decay. The damage shows up later rather than during the storm.

Monsoon thunderstorms, roughly July into September. Short, violent, and localized. Microbursts produce sudden downward wind that behaves differently than steady wind. These storms also saturate ground quickly after dry stretches, which is the combination that uproots trees.

Winter snow load on evergreens. Spruces and pines hold snow in a way deciduous trees cannot, and heavy accumulation splits leaders and tears limbs.

Each of these tests is something different. A tree that handled a dry windstorm fine may fail in a monsoon storm with a fraction of the wind speed, because the soil is holding it differently.

When to Actually Schedule the Inspection

Late winter, roughly January through early March, is the best single window. Two reasons, and both are practical.

First, the canopy is bare. Every union, crack, deadwood pocket, and included bark seam is visible from the ground. The same inspection in June, with leaves on, misses a substantial portion of what is there. Anyone who has looked at the same tree in both seasons knows how different it looks.

Second, it puts you ahead of the wet spring snow rather than behind it. Corrective pruning done in late winter also lands in the ideal window for the tree, since dormant season cuts get the tree's strongest growth response immediately afterward.

A second look in late summer is worth it if you have large trees over structures. By then you can see canopy density, spot dieback that appeared over the season, and catch hail damage from earlier in the year.

One scheduling note that matters more than it sounds. Crews book out after storms. The window to get corrective work done is the quiet part of the calendar, not the week the forecast turns. Booking an inspection three days before a weather event mostly accomplishes nothing.

What an Inspection Can Find, and What It Cannot

This is the part homeowners are rarely told, and it changes what you should expect.

Tree risk assessment is done at levels, and they are not equivalent:

A limited visual assessment is a fast look, often from one side or from a vehicle, useful for screening many trees quickly. It will catch obvious problems and miss most others.

A basic assessment is the standard. A walk around the entire tree from the ground, examining the root collar, trunk, unions, and canopy from multiple angles, with a look at site conditions. This is what most residential inspections are and what most situations need.

An advanced assessment uses specific tools to answer a specific question. Resistance drilling or sonic tomography to measure remaining sound wood in a trunk, a climbing or aerial inspection to examine unions up close, root collar excavation to look for girdling roots or decay at the base.

The honest limitation: a visual inspection cannot reliably see inside a trunk. A tree can look sound and be substantially hollow. Bark grows over decay pockets. A trunk that gives a hollow sound when tapped is a signal, not a measurement.

So the useful question to ask is what level you are getting. For a mature tree over your house that you have concerns about, a basic visual assessment may reasonably end with a recommendation for an advanced one. That is a good outcome, not an upsell.

The Ground Level Walk Around You Can Do Yourself

Twice a year, ideally once with leaves off and once in full leaf, walk each significant tree and look at four zones.

The ground around the base. Look for soil cracking, mounding, or lifting on one side, which suggests the root plate is moving. Look for exposed or severed roots from trenching, construction, or landscape work. Note whether soil has been piled against the trunk.

The root collar and lower trunk. You should see the trunk flare outward where it meets the soil. If the trunk goes into the ground straight like a telephone pole, the flare is buried and that is a problem worth investigating. Look for mushrooms, shelf fungi, or conks anywhere at the base, since fruiting bodies indicate decay that is already well established.

The trunk and major unions. Look for vertical cracks, seams, cavities, and bark that is loose or missing. At each fork, check whether the bark in the union is pushed up and outward, which is strong, or pinched inward into a narrow seam, which is included bark and weak.

The canopy. Compare density side to side. Note deadwood, and specifically whether there is more than last year. Look for hanging or broken limbs left over from a previous storm. Watch for a canopy that has changed angle.

Three things escalate immediately regardless of what else you find: a limb hanging in the canopy, a crack that opens visibly in wind, and any new lean with disturbed soil at the base. A sudden lean in particular has several distinct causes worth understanding, and some of them mean the tree is actively failing.

Saturated Soil Fails Differently Than Wind Alone

This distinction explains most of the confusing storm damage people see, and the original framing of "wind breaks branches" only covers half of it.

Dry ground, high wind. The root plate holds. Force concentrates in the canopy and the tree fails at its weakest structural point, usually a union or a previously damaged limb. You get broken branches and torn out leaders.

Saturated ground, moderate wind. The soil loses its grip on the root plate. The whole tree can tip, sometimes in wind that would not have broken a single limb a week earlier. This is why trees come down in monsoon storms that did not feel especially severe.

Local conditions make this worse in a specific way. Ground that has been dry for weeks can shed the first hard rain rather than absorbing it evenly, and then saturate quickly once it does take water. A heavy monsoon cell can deliver a large volume of water and a microburst within minutes of each other.

Two practical implications. Trees with restricted or damaged root systems, meaning anything near recent trenching, a new driveway, a patio, or heavy equipment traffic, are far more vulnerable in wet conditions than their canopies suggest. And a tree that is fine in a dry windstorm has not been tested for this.

What Gets Missed at the Base of the Tree

Failures at the root collar are common and largely invisible unless someone specifically looks.

Girdling roots. Roots that circle the trunk instead of radiating outward, usually a legacy of container growing or improper planting. As the trunk expands, the circling root strangles it, restricting the vascular system and creating a weak point right where the leverage is highest. A trunk that goes straight into the ground with no visible flare, or that appears pinched or flattened on one side at the base, is the tell.

Trees planted too deep. Extremely common in residential landscapes. The root collar sits below grade, stays wet, and decays.

Mulch piled against the trunk. The volcano shaped mulch ring holds moisture against bark that is not adapted to it and encourages the same problem.

Old trunk wounds at mower height. Repeated string trimmer and mower contact damages bark at the base and opens the way for decay in the most structurally critical part of the tree.

Any of these can be checked by carefully clearing soil and mulch away from the base until the flare is visible. If the flare is buried more than an inch or two, that is worth addressing.

Not Every Defect Is Worth Fixing

An inspection that lists every imperfection is not helpful. What matters is which defects create actual risk, and that depends on three things together.

How likely the part is to fail. A dead limb is more likely to come down than a live one. A union with included bark is more likely to split than a strong union. A hollow trunk with a thin remaining shell is more likely to fail than a solid one.

What is underneath it. This is the piece homeowners skip. A defective limb over an open back lawn and the same limb over a driveway where cars park are entirely different problems. Arborists talk about targets for exactly this reason.

What happens if it does fail. A ten pound branch and a thousand pound leader produce different outcomes even from the same height.

The practical result is a priority list rather than a checklist. Deadwood over a patio comes out this month. A weak union on a tree at the back fence line goes on the watch list. Neither of those is the wrong answer, they are just answers to different questions.

Where a union is structurally suspect but the tree is otherwise sound and worth keeping, support hardware is an option. The way cabling and bracing systems reduce movement in a weak union makes them genuinely preventive, but they work far better installed before a failure than after one.

What Fixes a Storm Risk, and What Makes It Worse

Removing deadwood helps. Dead limbs come down eventually, and they come down in the wind.

Reducing weight on overextended limbs helps. Shortening a long, heavy limb back to an appropriate lateral reduces the leverage acting on its attachment point.

Correcting structure on young trees helps enormously. A codominant stem removed on a small tree is a two minute job. The same defect on a mature tree is a cabling project or a removal.

Selective, modest canopy thinning can help, done sparingly and distributed through the crown.

Consistent watering helps. Drought stressed trees have weaker wound response and less resilience.

Topping makes it worse. Cutting limbs back to stubs to "reduce wind risk" is the most damaging thing done to trees. The resulting sprouts are attached only to the outer wood, they grow fast, and within a few years the tree is denser, taller, and considerably more prone to failure than before.

Lion's tailing makes it worse. This is the one that gets sold as storm preparation. Stripping out interior branches and foliage so wind "passes through" leaves all the remaining weight concentrated at the ends of long bare limbs. That increases the lever arm, removes the interior growth that dampens movement, and exposes previously shaded bark to sun. It looks tidy and it makes failure more likely. If someone proposes thinning your tree by clearing out the inside, that is a reason to get another opinion.

Over-thinning makes it worse for the same structural reasons, plus the sunscald risk on thin barked species in this climate.

Raising the canopy too high makes it worse. Lower limbs contribute to trunk taper and stability.

Young and Newly Planted Trees Have Their Own Failure Modes

The original point that young trees need inspection too is right, but the reasons are specific.

Staking left on too long. Support ties are meant to come off after roughly a year. Left in place, they girdle the trunk and prevent the tree from developing the trunk strength that comes from moving in wind. A staked tree that has never flexed is a weak tree when the stake finally comes off.

Codominant leaders forming. Easily corrected with a single cut in the first few years. Nearly impossible to correct later.

Planted too deep, or planted with the burlap and wire basket left high.

Nursery stakes and tags never removed, which girdle small stems quickly.

Fifteen minutes of structural pruning on a young tree prevents the defect that would otherwise require cabling or removal in twenty years. This is the highest return tree work there is.

What to Do in the Days After a Storm

Stay away from anything touching a line. Assume every downed wire is live and call the utility, not a tree service.

Look up before you walk under anything. Hangers, meaning broken limbs caught in the canopy, are the most dangerous storm leftover. They can come down at any point with no warning, including on a calm day.

Photograph damage before cleanup for insurance purposes.

Do not cut on anything under tension. A bent, pinned, or partly split limb releases unpredictably when cut.

Check the base of every large tree, not just the damaged ones. Soil cracking or lifting on one side means the root plate moves even if the tree looks upright.

Do not assume a damaged tree must come out. Storm damage varies enormously. A tree that lost one limb cleanly may be fine. A tree that lost half its canopy or has a split main stem usually is not. This is where fast, competent emergency response makes the difference between a repair and a replacement, because acting quickly preserves options that disappear if the wound sits open through a season.

Insurance, Documentation, and Neglect

Worth understanding in general terms, though coverage varies considerably and your own policy is the authority.

Homeowners policies commonly cover damage caused by a tree falling on a covered structure. Coverage for removing a tree that fell on nothing at all is frequently limited or absent, which surprises people. Damage to a fence, a shed, or a vehicle may fall under different parts of a policy or a different policy entirely.

The part relevant to inspections: insurers can and do scrutinize whether a tree was visibly hazardous and left unaddressed. A tree that was obviously dead, split, or leaning for a long stretch before it fell is a different claim than a healthy tree brought down by an unusual event. Documentation of periodic inspection and completed corrective work is worth keeping for that reason.

Liability toward a neighbor works similarly in broad terms. Knowledge of a hazard tends to matter, which is another argument for having your trees looked at and for keeping the report.

Check the specifics with your carrier before you need to.

Conclusion

The most useful change most Colorado property owners can make is moving the inspection earlier. Late winter beats late spring on both counts that matter: the structure is visible with the leaves off, and it puts corrective work ahead of the wet spring snow that does the most limb damage.

Beyond timing, three things carry the weight. Understand what an inspection can and cannot detect, since a visual assessment does not see inside a trunk. Prioritize by what sits underneath the defect rather than by the defect alone. And be skeptical of storm prep that involves thinning out the interior of a canopy, because that specific practice makes trees more likely to fail, not less.

Between professional visits, a twice yearly walk around the base, trunk, unions, and canopy of each large tree catches most of what develops, and it costs nothing but the time.

Book a Storm Season Tree Inspection

If you have large trees near your house, driveway, or power service and you have not had them looked at, an assessment before the next round of weather will tell you which limbs need to come off, which defects can wait, and whether anything needs support. Late winter is the ideal time to get it on the calendar, ahead of the spring snow. You can schedule an inspection for your property, call (970) 589-2268, or email joshua@treeclimbersservices.com.

Frequently Asked Questions