Wikipedia says: An escarpment is a steep slope or long cliff that occurs from erosion or faulting and separates two relatively level areas of differing elevations.
The land under Tiny House Ontario is on a limestone fault, at a quite high elevation when compared to the surrounding land. There are a lot of rock piles here too.
The closest city to us, is Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Kingston sits at about 25 feet above sea level, whereas Tiny House Ontario, which is within 30 Km of Kingston sits at about 200 feet above sea level. The difference in height is not so great; the approximate height of a 20 story building, and the gradient upward is not a sheer drop. As a matter of fact probably about half of the height is covered in the distance before you arrive at the escarpment, and it is somewhat hilly too, so unless you are on a bicycle or on foot, you would probably not know that you are going up hill.
Along the same escarpment where the road goes though, they have the same elevation as me and because the road is through, you can see Kingston’s water tower, radio towers and also lots of the windmills on Wolfe Island. I have included here some images from two different seasons near the edge of the escarpment on my land and one where the road is open so you can see the height and view.
My cousin Kenny, who knows this land, says that I should remove a few of the softwood trees so that the hard ones will grow larger with the light and I will have a better view. What would you do? Cut a few trees so that you would get a better view and more light? Let it stay the way that it grows naturally?
**Please note that I changed the title of this post from view to lookout because Tiny House Ontario sits far away from the ridge, so any potential for seeing into the distance would be purely as a place to walk to, and lookout from. At Tiny House Ontario, you can see only inside the forest.**
Tiny House Ontario 
When my husband and I bought 30 acres, 2/3 wooded, in 2003, very many trees had been marked for “harvesting”. The seller of the land needed money and if a buyer for the land had not been forthcoming, he would have got his money from the trees. Although my husband thought getting some of our purchase price back might be a good idea, I would not hear of having the woods logged off. I know that there are many young trees fighting to grow under the canopy of some very large ones, but I also wanted nature to do what she wanted.
I have a gigantic Sugar maple that I call Great Mother Tree that I feel the same about as you do your large Shagbark hickory. I also have many Shagbark hickories. What I don’t have is any softwoods. (To me softwoods means evergreens–pines, spruces and cedars.) If I had a lot of them, my feelings might be different about thinning them, but probably only if they were really densely growing.
One of my sons cuts up any dead or severely broken trees for firewood. I also have been losing 1 large oak a year to oak wilt. He also cuts those for firewood. Otherwise, everything else is up to Mother Nature.
I enjoy reading about your tiny getaway!
Thank you for your insightful comment, and also for leaving your trees.
I don’t have any of the larger evergreens on the escarpment except a few low scrub junipers. I was thinking about putting in a few of them along the drive way now that there is more light in that area, in order so that there is always a bit of green even in winter. I am not sure how they would do there though because the earth is only 3-4 feet deep before it hits the sedimentary limestone.
By soft wood, I meant the “prickly pear”, white and yellow birch, poplar, aspen, shad bush and downy serviceberry bush. I would not want to take out any white birch because they are such pretty things year around but if I do decide to take few out, these are what would, I think open up things enough through the big ones that there would be windows to peek through in the canopy.
I lean more heavily to not cutting them, over cutting, I am thinking about calling Natural Resources, to ask them, but I would really like to have my own tree botanist. I guess that the best place to find one of them is in the woods, so hopefully, I get lucky! It would be nice to know if the harder varieties would really benefit from the removal of some of the smaller competition.
I didn’t realize you were so close to Kingston. My grandmother was from Kingston, Ontario. I would say it is a small world, but considering we’re building tiny houses that just sounds silly.
But to actually chime in on your question – I wouldn’t take out many trees. If there were a few scrubby ones that are in the way and would make the site better overall, I might suggest taking down those ones. The only exception I would make would be to evaluate where the sun hits if you needed to get the solar energy going.
I would leave them, of course. Nature knows what it’s doing far better than we. Besides, I like the privacy. ;^)