Working its way northwest along the river past orchards, horse properties, and custom-built homes with real acreage spread out near Doniphan Drive and Country Club Road, the Upper Valley is the metro's quietest, greenest edge — and finding the junk here usually means walking well beyond the front door.
Once you're past the subdivisions and heading northwest along the river, the character of El Paso changes fast — working horse properties, pecan orchards, and custom-built homes on real acreage replace the tighter in-town lots, and the pace of the work slows to match. We haul off storm-downed limbs and brush once orchard trimming wraps for the season, retire old livestock panels no longer needed around a corral, and clear out oversized garages and barns nobody's touched in years. Because the driveways run long and the lots run deep out here, we skip asking anyone to drag anything to the curb and simply bring the truck to wherever the pile is. Horse-property jobs are a regular part of the mix too — worn tack nobody uses, a cracked water trough, broken fence rail past repair — plus the leftover stone and gravel once a landscaping job wraps up. When ownership of a property that's stayed in one family for generations finally changes hands, we ease off the pace and set aside anything worth keeping before the rest gets loaded. The price never climbs just because the driveway is long, and all the green waste we haul goes to composting instead of a landfill.