Making the best use of a sudden abundance of branches

The weather in Colorado being what it is, we got about six inches of wet heavy snow on Tuesday, and nearly all of our neighbors lost branches or trees. I offered to let people drop branches off at our house so that they wouldn't end up in landfills. Long story short, our entire backyard is now a brush pile. My basic plan is to chop things up enough that they lay reasonably flat, and incorporate them into the sheet mulching we were working on before the storm. But I wanted to check and see whether there were any better uses of them, or potentially faster-to-process ones. (My husband is leery of accepting more branches until the pile looks less daunting). For reference, we're in year one of trying to build topsoil on our 1/10th of an acre of scalped clay, and suburban code enforcement basically prevents us from leaving whole branches anywhere that people can see them. We're planning to save any reasonably straight sturdy poles to build a shade structure of some sort.

Hugelkulture?
Dead hedges to retain topsoil?
Weve raised beds or little fences by bashing sturdy branches into the ground upright and weaving smaller sticks in and out of the uprights?
Biochar?
Charcoal?
Woodchip mulch?

I'll toss another vote in for hugelkultur. They don't have to be huge to be effetive, but you will need some dirt/compost/clay to layer with it, otherwise you will just have mounded dry branches. If you do go the hugelkultur route you're gonna want to remember to irrigate pretty well the first year, especially with your dry climate, but after a winter snow melt it should become a great resource.

Definitely planning to do hugelkultur, I was just wondering if there were any techniques that were particularly well suited to large quantities of fresh branches. What we've been doing so far is building piles of branches (chopped up a bit so it's not mostly air) and then covering them in the woodchip/coffee grounds mixture that we're using for general sheet mulching. The branches are mostly aspen, maple, and willow with a bit of pine and one 7' perfectly conical fir that I strongly suspect was someone's old Christmas tree. The deciduous branches are mostly in leaf (I'm assuming the trees didn't expect a late May snowstorm any more than the humans did) so I've been trying to get those buried first before the leaves fully dry out.

If you cut some willow branches and store them in a base or bucket of water they wil root and you suddenly have hundreds of living fence posts to make green fences and structures out of. That's what we have alot of I love them.
If you are short on dirt you can try digging a trench, throwing the branchhes in and covering it with the dirt you got out of the hole.
You'll likely get a few volunteer willows anyway and there's so many uses for willow. You can make your own rooting hormone for a start!

I would rent a wood chipper for the day and chip everything wrist size and under.  Wood chips have been far more helpful to me than any other thing I have done.

Hi Wiley,

A lot of great ideas here. I like taking a big group of trimmings and just pile them up.  Trimmings make a really good variation in habitat/micro-climate and they breakdown quickly.  I have a couple of spots where I throw weeds, trimmings, sod cuttings and etc.  I'm not a neat gardener and it seems to improve the amount of

flora and fauna in my forest.  If you have an area where you let things grow wild i.e. don't mow, this is a good spot for a pile.  I get volunteer wild-flower, trees and yes some weeds.  I've noticed that many pests and non-pest insects actually prefer the native/wild stuff that comes up.  The finches love the grass seed.

Willow is awesome.    I would be surprised if you didn't get quite a bit of it sprouting.   I used to start willow and get some roots going.  Now I just stick a twig in the ground with at least two buds.   They take easily.