No hunt should be easier than the annual quest for a Christmas tree.

Conifers, you probably have noticed while traveling through a forest, don’t get around much.

Even in a heavy wind a juvenile fir is incapable of fleeing once you’ve homed in on it, your hand clutching the saw a bit tighter in anticipation.

Elk are less accommodating.

Trees, besides their gratifying lack of mobility, are quite abundant.

Even accounting for the considerable variety in age, height and width, a typical forest boasts a surfeit of specimens suitable for display in your living room.

(Or your front yard, if you prefer dimensions that are more, well, Griswoldian.)

Yet this seemingly straightforward task, so vital to a proper Christmas atmosphere, plagues me almost every year.

Along about Thanksgiving I begin to ponder the hunt, and like as not I have only the vaguest idea of where to seek my fragrant quarry.

I try to prepare.

During summer hikes I’ll notice an occasional shapely tree that seems to meet the basic requirements.

But almost inevitably I neglect to note the location. And when I try to remember, my brain conjures a meaningless scene of generic forest which is as useless to me as an algebraic equation.

(And as indecipherable.)

Still and all, I enjoy the quest.

I’ve harvested the family Christmas tree from the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest every winter for better than a quarter century and rarely, if ever, have I returned to the driveway disappointed with our choice.

Some years the decision is easy, so perfect does the tree look when one of us spots it.

But occasionally there is a spirited debate about multiple candidates, perhaps even some derisive comments of the sort usually reserved for sports teams and politicians.

(Except sports teams and politicians rarely are demeaned for their unsightly gaps and crooked trunk, unless the gap is in the defensive backfield and crooked refers to some legislator’s financial dealings.)

Regardless, there is a Currier & Ives quality to tromping through the woods — particularly when those woods are appropriately snow-flocked — searching for the tree that will for the next few weeks bear the familiar ornaments and enrich the indoors with the fresh scent of sap and balsam which the chemists with their clever concoctions can never quite replicate.

Although snow, despite the grace it lends to almost any scene, can also be a plain nuisance.

In multiple ways.

If winter storms arrive early, snow can block roads leading to prime tree-hunting places.

I have driven through drifts as tall as my rig’s tires, and dragged a tree for close to a mile through snow, but neither situation was ideal.

(In this respect, if no other, the hunt for a Christmas tree can be compared with the hunt for the aforementioned elk. In both cases the carcass, as it were, is a burden which will take advantage of every chance to snag on a stump or otherwise annoy, and exhaust, the person doing the dragging.)

Currier & Ives subjects, suffice it to say, never are depicted with sweat dripping down their cheeks. Or with cartoon balloons containing a profanity-laden tirade from someone trying to put on tire chains in a blizzard.

Snow also hides flaws.

Even an unkempt fir can seem nearly perfect when a few inches of powder adorn its branches.

It is much harder, after a recent fall of snow, to distinguish legitimate Christmas tree candidates, a process that involves much jiggling of limbs to dislodge the snow, some of which, inevitably, will land on your neck and slink damp, icy fingers down your spine.

There was little risk of such unpleasantness this year, however.

Since a couple snowstorms in late October, the weather has been relatively mild and tranquil.

I went out for a walk on Saturday, Nov. 18 in the snow-free forest near Phillips Reservoir. Although long ago I stuffed a few different species into the tree stand, mainly in the spirit of experimentation, many years ago I simplified the search by settling on grand firs.

These are both common — including at the lower elevations that are more reliably accessible in late November — and endowed with layered limbs well-suited for decorating.

They are also conspicuous where I hiked, with needles much darker green than the ponderosa pines and Douglas-firs that are the predominant species.

I found what I initially thought was the tree.

It’s a grand fir, but one with abnormally short needles more typical of a subalpine fir, a species that grows only at much higher elevations.

The next day I returned with my wife, Lisa, and our son, Max, confident that they would agree with my assessment.

They did not.

Although Lisa concurred that the tree was nicely shaped, she pointed out that it is perhaps twice as tall as the ceiling in our living room.

I muttered something about trimming, but my retort was without passion.

She was right — the tree wasn’t up to our standards.

We drove higher on the western slopes of the Elkhorn Mountains, where grand firs, especially on more sheltered slopes, are more numerous.

A cold front has passed in the night and brought the barest skiff of snow. It felt properly wintry, though, with a temperature around freezing and a brisk breeze from the west.

We walked a few miles on a road that withered to something more akin to a footpath and then gave out altogether. We saw a few grand firs that might have worked if Christmas were nearer and we were desperate, but this was merely a scouting expedition.

I didn’t even have a saw.

Or a national forest Christmas tree permit.

Lisa, though, had spied a candidate above the road while we were driving. I parked at the spot and we hiked up the slope to have a look.

This tree wasn’t quite right, either, but while we were sizing it up I saw another grand fir nearby.

We walked over and the usual sequence of comments, as familiar as the seasonal carols, began.

Me: “Not bad at all.”

Lisa: “It’s cute.”

We acknowledged the inevitable imperfections with any tree not raised in a nursery — a dead limb whose amputation will leave a minor gap, another limb that extends farther than its counterpart on the opposite side of the trunk.

“We can put that side against the wall,” Lisa said — the annual concession.

We agreed, as always, with an informal consensus.

All that’s left is to decide when to return to claim our prize.

The possibility that some other hunter will get there first is so disturbing to contemplate, so terribly unfair to imagine, that we react in the only reasonable way.

We pretend it’s impossible.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.

Cutting your own Christmas tree

BAKER CITY — Christmas tree permits for national forest lands in the Blue Mountains are available at forest offices, many local businesses, and online through recreation.gov.

Permits purchased online must be printed to be valid.

Christmas tree permits cost $5 each and are limited to one per household. An additional $2.50 fee will be charged for permits bought through recreation.gov.

As part of the national “Every Kid Outdoors” initiative, all fourth graders are eligible for a free Christmas tree permit from their local national forest. For students to receive a free tree permit, they must present a valid paper voucher printed from the Every Kid Outdoors website. Visit https://everykidoutdoors.gov/ and follow instructions to obtain and print the paper voucher.

For more information about the Christmas tree programs on the three national forests in the Blue Mountains, go to fs.usda.gov/umatilla, fs.usda.gov/malheur or fs.usda.gov/wallowa-whitman.

General guidelines include:

• Cut your tree at least 50 feet away from the road.

• Clean up any trimmings or limbs.

• Leave stumps no higher than 10 inches. It is not legal to “top” a tree taller than 15 feet.

• Remove any green limbs left that remain on the stump.

• Do not cut in active timber sales or areas that have been planted with new trees.

• Do not cut on private land, wilderness areas, designated campgrounds, or existing tree plantations.

• Do not cut trees in the municipal watersheds, ski areas or experimental forests.

• Do not cut trees in posted old growth areas or within 1/4 mile of wild and scenic corridors.

• Christmas tree cutting within sight of a state highway is prohibited.

National forests in the Blue Mountains are amply endowed with multiple species of conifers that are suitable for Christmas trees.

Here’s a list of some of the common tree species in our region:

Grand fir/white fir

These true firs are abundant at the lower elevations that are more likely to be accessible in late fall.

They also have a classic Christmas tree form, with nicely spaced branches that offer plenty of places for ornaments, lights and tinsel.

Although grand fir and white fir are separate species, hybrids bearing traits of both are common in the Blue Mountains, the late Charles Grier Johnson Jr., longtime forest ecologist in the Blues for the Forest Service, wrote in his definitive “Alpine and Subalpine Vegetation of the Wallowa, Seven Devils and Blue Mountains.”

“Hybridization between these two true firs … make identification difficult,” Johnson wrote.

Subalpine fir

Full-grown subalpine firs are easy to recognize from their slender, dart-like shape. But in juvenile form they sometimes resemble grand firs.

A distinguishing characteristic of the subalpine fir is its needles. They grow at all angles from the limb, rather than in flat, orderly rows as a grand or white fir’s do.

Although subalpine firs usually grow at higher elevations than grand firs, the two species occasionally mingle between about 5,500 and 6,000 feet.

Douglas-fir

Not a true fir — hence the hyphen — these conifers have more in common with hemlocks.

Although Douglas-fir is a favorite Christmas tree species in the Cascades and Coast Range, the Rocky Mountain variety that grow in our forests typically aren’t as graceful in appearance as grand or white firs.

Lodgepole pine

Lodgepole pines are easy to find, but lodgepole pines that make good Christmas trees are not.

Lodgepoles of the right height tend to be a bit sparse of limb and a bit unkempt in appearance, as though they had slept in an alley.

Lodgepoles are the only pines native to Oregon whose needle bundles contain two needles (ponderosa pines have three needles per bundle, white and whitebark pines five).

Ponderosa pine

Like lodgepoles, ponderosa pines are plentiful in many places, especially at lower elevations. But their long needles aren’t well-suited for ornament placement, and they lack the layered limbs that distinguish firs.

Engelmann spruce

A person might mistake a spruce for a fir, but there’s an easy way to tell which is which: grab a limb.

If you think you just poked a porcupine, you just touched a spruce.

Spruce needles are stiff and have prickly edges, unlike the softer, more finger-friendly firs.

Spruce trees usually grow in wet areas, and often are found in groves near streams.