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. A wild Christmas tree harvester for 50 years, he owns more than 300 acres of timber rights on Worley Mountain, between Eagle Lake and Susanville, California. 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.”
Strauch first came here in the early ’70s with my godfather, Joe McNally. Both were new to the business and looking for adventure. They learned from their failures, hauling broken trucks out of snowdrifts, watching trees vanish under sudden storms, fingers stiff with cold and frustration. Every winter, they returned with the same mission: to bring a piece of wilderness into people’s homes.
Now, Strauch relies on mostly migrant Mexican workers who travel north each winter, many of them fresh off orchards or vineyards. This year, according to Dan Barker, who helps oversee the harvest, dramatic shifts in immigration policy and increasing danger from ICE raids have brought new uncertainty to the work.
Typically, two crews — about 18 men altogether — form the backbone of the operation: a cook, two drivers, two cutters, a bail operator, with the rest hauling trees from deep in the forest. They rotate roles and move quickly, slicing and dragging silvertips down steep ridgelines, where they’re graded for shape, symmetry and color: 2s, 1s, primos and double primos, each priced accordingly. This year, an 8-foot double primo will likely sell for around $250 on the lot, while a 2 of the same size would bring in about half that.
“The better we take care of the trees, the better they take care of us.”
The harvest relies on a practice called coppicing or stump culturing, a careful cut that allows a tree’s base to regenerate. Within a few years, one of the remaining branches receives internal signals and turns toward the sun, growing into a new tree that can be harvested again and again. “We’re not clear-cutting,” Strauch said. “The better we take care of the trees, the better they take care of us. Some, we’ll get five, 10 harvests. Those are the mothers.” The forest renews itself without replanting, tilling or spraying in a simple, sustainable cycle that has kept these slopes producing for decades.
Strauch’s Worley Mountain stand yields roughly 7,000 trees each year, and it is one of the nation’s last commercial wild Christmas tree harvests. It’s small-scale compared to farmed Christmas tree operations, but its value lies in silvertips’ rarity, sustainability and the relationship between land and labor. “These are beautiful trees with a beautiful story,” Barker said. “We don’t just want people to accept them — we want them to love them like we do.”
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This article appeared in the December 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Wild Harvest.”
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