Precarity and Entanglement in the Wild Christmas Tree Harvest

Parts of this essay originally appeared in High Country News (December, 2025).

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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, shaping the trees’ distinctive concentric branching.

The first freeze arrives and so do the rugged crews of harvesters. Silvertip firs must accumulate enough cold hours for their needles to “set,” ensuring they won’t drop before December. And then, “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. And it’s a race against time, with only a limited number of days before the crews are snowed off the mountain. “If it snows early, you’re done.”

On Worley Mountain, 360 remote acres accessible only by steep volcanic tracks, the land and the workers move in tandem. Here, ecological processes dictate human schedules, a reminder that labor time is tethered to ecological time. A cutter must read a tree the way one reads weather: its lean, its density, the brittleness of a branch in early frost. Work becomes a form of ecological literacy.

But the mountain is shifting. Warmer springs, volatile freeze-thaw cycles, and prolonged drought alter the rhythm of the harvest. Hundreds of thousands of acres have vanished to climate-driven megafires. And anti-immigrant sentiment and policies are adding fuel to the fire.

Precarious Work in the Mountains

Bambi, who has harvested these mountains for nearly fifty years, depends on crews of mostly Mexican migrant workers, men who move in step with California’s agricultural calendar, following seasonal routes that scholars call “agricultural migration corridors.”

This year, with the Trump administration, what was once certain is now an additional variable in an already unpredictable harvest. 

“This year is especially hard,” shared Dan Barker, who has worked with Bambi for the last several harvests. “With the pressures on immigration, it’s no longer a certainty to have guys to cut and haul trees.”

Their labor is highly skilled. A cutter knows how to drop a 40-foot fir without breaking a single branch. A “shagger” carries 80 pounds of tree over uneven ground at 7,000 feet. The team moves with a choreography learned through years of embodied practice, a form of ecological knowledge that rarely appears in economic summaries of the holiday market.

Wild Harvest in a Volatile Climate

Unlike the vast farmed Christmas tree plantations of Oregon and North Carolina, Silvertips cannot be mass-produced. They thrive only in high-elevation forests between 6,000 and 8,000 feet. Instead of planting rows, cutters use a practice known as stump culturing, leaving whorls of branches so one can turn upward and regenerate. A single stump may be harvested five or ten times over decades.

But wild harvesting is still tethered to volatile markets. Artificial trees, manufactured overseas under very different labor conditions, have reshaped holiday economies. Their rise reflects the pressures of globalized, industrialized supply chains that reduce ecological variability to predictable mass production.

“Sometimes,” Bambi said, “the hardest part isn’t the mountain. It’s everything off the mountain.”

The forest regenerates at one pace. Markets move at another.

Returning to Worley Mountain this year, more than a decade after my first season, I found a forest both resilient and threatened. The Worley stand continues to produce roughly 7,000 trees each year. But not far away, near Tennant, California, a companion 30,000 acre stand burned in the 2021 Antelope Fire. Bambi was devastated. Four years on, regeneration is sparse. High-severity fires can push subalpine conifers beyond recovery thresholds.

This year brought a new kind of damage: sunburn. Extreme heat in May and June scorched tender new growth across thousands of trees. Bambi walked me through rows of browned tips, damaged not by fire or drought, but by unprecedented heat.

Environmental change becomes economic vulnerability. And that vulnerability falls hardest on workers whose livelihoods are already precarious.

What the Forest Teaches

As a photographer, I returned to this harvest to make images. What I found was a living system of relationships, a human ecology shaped by risk, memory, and adaptation.

Wild Silvertip harvesting exposes the interdependence of ecological cycles and migrant labor, of political borders and holiday rituals, of wildfire regimes and commodity markets. It reveals, in other words, the infrastructure beneath nostalgia.

The forest teaches one lesson clearly: regeneration is possible, but only under conditions that support it. The same is true for the people who work there.

One night, the temperature dropped to 22 degrees. The crew shared tequila to stay warm. A full moon rose over the ridge. Freshly cut trees waited in stacks for their long journey to tree lots across the West.

In that moment, the tree was still part of a mountain, still held by a network of relationships that rarely appear in the modern consumer holiday imagination.

Perhaps the deeper story of the Silvertip harvest is not one of tradition but of entanglement: labor with landscape, capital with climate, risk with ritual. A Christmas tree is not just decoration. It is evidence of how intertwined human and ecological worlds have always been.

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Featured image: The wild Christmas tree trade starts high atop northern California’s Cascade Mountains. Photo by author, 2025.

Allen Myers is a photographer, filmmaker, and journalist based in Portland, Oregon. A founder of Regenerating Paradise, his work explores the intersection of labor, ecology, and community resilience in regions shaped by wildfire, climate change, and migration. His documentary and photographic practice blends environmental storytelling with place-based inquiry, tracing how human and ecological histories shape one another across the American West. Website. Instagram. Facebook. Contact.