Gutter Cleaning in Damascus, OR

Clearly Amazing cleans gutters in Damascus, working from an office on SW 74th Avenue in Tigard. Damascus is not a city. It incorporated in 2004, voted to disincorporate in 2016, and the Oregon Supreme Court reinstated that vote on September 3, 2020, so this is unincorporated Clackamas County with the lot sizes and tree cover to match. More canopy over a roof means more in the gutters, and on the rolling ground below Mount Talbert an overflow travels rather than sits.

Call (503) 255-2532 for a free on-site estimate.

Big wooded lots put more on your roof

Damascus covers 16.14 square miles and had a population of roughly 11,050 in 2020. Happy Valley, immediately west, fits more than twice that many people into a smaller footprint. That difference is the character of the place: markedly lower-density, more rural ground at about 712 feet in the foothills of the Cascade Range, east of Interstate 205, west of Boring, strung along Highway 212.

For gutters, low density mostly means trees. An acre out here can carry mature forest on two sides of the house, and the regional mix does two very different things over a roofline.

Douglas-fir is the dominant conifer in this part of the Willamette Valley. It holds its needles three or four years and then releases them a few at a time, all year round, so there is no single week when a fir is finished. What lands is small and it packs. Wet needles knit into a dense mat that water sits on rather than runs through, and a blower skims the loose top layer and leaves the mat behind. Bigleaf maple does the opposite: one concentrated drop through October and November, seed helicopters along with leaves the size of a dinner plate. Two or three lying flat across an outlet will seal it outright.

OSU Extension is direct about what that shade and damp does above the gutter line. Roof moss thrives on moist, shady rooftops, is made worse by overhanging branches, slows runoff, can lift and curl shingle edges, and once dried adds to fire load.

Where the water goes after it leaves your downspout

Rock Creek is a real creek here, not just a name on a subdivision sign. You cross it on Highway 212 heading east into Damascus. It is a subwatershed of the Clackamas River basin, draining about 6,278 acres, rising in the hills east of Interstate 205 and running southwest to its confluence with the Clackamas River. There is a USGS gauge on it at Sunnyside Road, and the Clackamas River Basin Council describes the subwatershed as not yet heavily developed for urban uses.

Mount Talbert sits at the western end of this, a cinder cone of the Boring Lava Field with a summit around 740 feet. Mount Talbert Nature Park, run by the North Clackamas Parks & Recreation District, wraps it in about 4.2 miles of trail and conifer forest, reached from Sunnyside Road and SE Mather Road. The ground between the butte and the creek rolls, and roof runoff on rolling ground keeps going.

On a rural lot the water your roof sheds stays on your own property a good deal longer than it would on a city block. That makes where a downspout discharges more important here, not less. One emptying beside a downhill foundation wall, or onto a slope running at the septic area or the driveway, is a problem the trough above it cannot fix however clean it is.

One practical note. Because the disincorporation stands, there is no city government and no city public works department to call. Planning here falls under Clackamas County directly, so if a drainage question crosses your property line it is the county you deal with, not a city hall.

What the job involves

Areas we cover

We work throughout the Damascus area of unincorporated Clackamas County: Sunnyside and the lots along Sunnyside Road, the ground around Mount Talbert and SE Mather Road, out along Highway 212 toward Boring, and through the Rock Creek drainage.

Damascus has no city government and no official neighborhood designations to point at, and unlike a platted suburb it has no long list of subdivision names either. Sunnyside is the one area name people here actually say. If your mail reads Damascus and you are unsure whether you are inside what we cover, send the address and we will tell you plainly.

When to schedule

Late September into October is the strongest window for most properties here. The main conifer drop is behind you and the system goes into the wet season clear. The regional pattern is winter-concentrated, essentially October through March with December the wettest month, so a gutter cleared in early October works through the entire heaviest stretch.

A second visit in late November or early December catches the bigleaf maple, which finishes weeks after the conifers. On a wooded acre that is usually the visit that earns its keep.

Any other month is fine, and people book them for good reasons: a January call after a storm made the overflow visible, a spring one because the property is being tidied anyway, a July one because dry footing makes the whole thing pleasanter. Gutters cleared in February do their job for the rest of the wet season.

Questions Damascus customers ask