Inside California's wild Christmas tree harvest - High Country News

"High on the volcanic shoulders of Northern California's Cascade Range, the air is thin enough to sting your lungs. Between the mid-October freeze and November's first heavy snow, chainsaws echo in short bursts, muffled by dense trees and resin-sweet air. In the morning half-light, a small crew labors rhythmically, harvesting wild red firs for sale in Christmas tree lots across the country."

"Red firs - Abies magnifica, more commonly known as silvertips for their fine, silver-tinged needles - thrive between 6,500 and 8,000 feet, clinging to rough terrain in California and Oregon that burns hot in summer and freezes hard in winter, a pattern that shapes the trees' distinctive concentric branching. "You only get a few weeks," John Wayne Strauch, whom everyone calls Bambi, told me."

"It's hard work: "If the ground doesn't freeze, the needles won't set," he said. "If it snows early, you're done." And it's a race against time, with only a limited number of days before the crews are snowed off the mountain. "Why are we doing this?" Strauch said. "Guys are barely breaking even ... but we just keep doing it.""

Wild red firs grow high in Northern California and Oregon between 6,500 and 8,000 feet, adapted to hot summer burns and severe winter freezes that shape concentric branching. Harvesting occurs during a narrow late-October window between mid-October freezes and November snows, with crews racing against weather because needles must set after ground freeze. Workers use chainsaws in morning half-light to cut trees for national Christmas tree markets. Longtime harvester John Wayne "Bambi" Strauch operates hundreds of acres and describes marginal economics. Harvest labor relies largely on migrant Mexican workers now affected by changing immigration policy and increased ICE risk.

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