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For whoppers, it takes a chopper
(Reprint of Grants Pass Daily Courier article, November 17, 2001.)
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George Jones of Grants Pass has a truckload of Shasta red fir Christmas trees ready to haul to his lot
in Los Angeles. His specialty trees, the 30- to 50-footers, have been delivered already.
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Entrepreneur sells trees of all sizes, but the big ones pay the bills
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By Jeff Duewel
of the Daily Courier
George Jones had been selling regular-sized Christmas trees for several years when he was visited by the ghost of Christmas future one evening while driving by the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Los Angeles.
He was with a tree grower from Northern Oregon who had sold the hotel a 50-foot blue spruce, which was standing tall in the hotel's fountain.
"I said, 'Wow, is that an ugly Christmas tree. I can do better than that,'" Jones said. "It just didn't have a good pyramid, cone shape. I thought, 'That's not a Christmas tree.'"
For three years, Jones sent the hotel pictures of trees he had spotted in Southern Oregon.
"They finally said, 'OK, ship us a tree.' I shipped them a beautiful 47-foot white fir, and I got the work ever since."
"That's how I got into the big trees."
Today the Grants Pass tree merchant continues to sell about 2,500 regular trees a year, some grown on his own property near Azalea and the rest purchased from Northern Oregon. He sells them for $6 to $11 per foot on a lot near his boyhood home in Los Angeles where he's set up shop for the last 13 years, from Thanksgiving to just before Christmas.
But sales of behemoth Christmas trees, from 30 to 55 feet tall, make up a quarter of his income, even though he's never sold more than seven in one year and his total for seven years is about 35. He knows of only three other companies on the West Coast that sell giant Christmas trees.
This year's crop of tall trees, which he sells for $100 a foot, plus shipping, will adorn Ritz-Carltons in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Palm Springs and Orange County.
The biggest is a 57-footer he sold for $6,600 to Sea World in San Diego.
There is no speculation -- he sells the trees, taking a 50 percent deposit, before they're even cut. All but four of his big trees over the years have been white firs.
Jones hires a helicopter capable of lifting 4,000 pounds from Snowy Butte Helicopters in Central Point, to load the big trees on his own tractor-trailer rig, which he hooks to a rented flatbed trailer and hauls to Los Angeles.
Helicopter time is $1,200 per hour, but Jones said he can harvest five trees in a little over an hour. He climbs the tree and hooks on the cable, then shimmies down and saws it, and the chopper takes it to the landing, where a small crew bundles the branches and loads the tree.
Jones has worked in the woods for years, collecting cones, thinning trees and doing post-logging rehab work for private companies and the Bureau of Land Management, so he's figured out where to find the big boys.
They're near Butte Falls and Howard Prairie Reservoir, on private timber lands owned by Boise Cascade, Rough and Ready and Superior lumber companies.
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Jones hires a helicopter to pluck his
big Christmas trees from the forest.
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"Now I know where the gold mine is," he said. "I spent a lot of summers looking for trees before I figured out where they were."
Jones said he found the secret of full-bodied, conical-shaped conifers a few years back from a forester who explained that those trees occur in high-elevation "frost pockets" where late frost occurs.
The new buds on the outside of the tree are killed by the frost, but interior buds survive, causing the branches to fill in.
"It's a natural shearing process that nature does," he said.
Trees on low-elev
ation plantations normally have to be sheared every summer to get the conical shape.
The rocky soil at higher elevations is also good, because it promotes slow growth, which also adds to a full shape.
Ironically, his first big tree came from a front yard in Puyallup, Wash. He noticed it while driving to church with his wife during a visit to his sister-in-law.
"I noticed this tree out of the corner of my eye, and did a U-turn," he said. "I offered them $1,000 and they jumped on it. The guy told me he planted it when he was a kid, and he was in his 50s."
The second year he sold three big trees, harvested from Chrome Ridge, but by his third year he was selling six and last year was up to seven. This year's crop was only five, because one hotel is remodeling and another was reeling from the recession.
He has 8,000 small trees on his own farm at Azalea where he plants 1,000 a year, producing about 600 a year for sale. His neighbor runs a U-cut operation at the farm while Jones is in Los Angeles.
Jones, who has a wife, Janie, and four children, says the downside of the business is it can ruin the holiday spirit.
"Ever since I've done this, Christmas hasn't been the same," he said. "You really miss the joy of the season, being around the house and enjoying the holidays."
A lot of things have fallen in place for Jones to build this niche business, including a favorable price, and his own skills that keep him from having to hire much outside help.
"When you pay log prices and you're selling it for big, beautiful Christmas trees, it works out pretty good," he said. "It's simple for me to do this. I can fall timber, climb trees, and drive a truck. You put all that together, and there's your profit."
Plus, he's got an eye for Christmas trees.
"The whole city is coming down to see these trees. The guys at the hotel who get the tree are always nervous about something going wrong," he said.
"When I show up with the tree and help them get it in the ground, they go nuts."
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