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Glenn Pritchard is serious about Christmas trees.

He'd hate for a family to end up paying too much for a tree loosing its color and its needles because it was cut too long ago, too far away.

In the thirty years he's been cutting Christmas trees, he's seen some strange tactics from the competition, including green spray paint.

Pritchard takes pride selling trees cut from nearby forests.

They're far from uniform in size, and positively leaking sap, but Pritchard said that's what he likes so much about the trees he sells.

"They just perfume up the house so nice," he said to one woman who said she was just looking.

Within minutes, Pritchard had explained to her that if she'd never had a pinyon Christmas tree, she was missing out. He showed her a few of his specimens, and she left with a bulbous, five-foot pinyon.

"We prefer the pinyon," Pritchard said. "That's all we've had for years and years and years. They smell so good."

His wife, Audrey, remembers when Glenn used to cut giant trees for the family to decorate. They weighed hundreds of pounds and nearly reached the 12-foot ceilings of the home.

"I can remember, they were beautiful," Audrey said. "I loved putting them up, but taking them down..." she sighed.

The Christmas tree business started, as Audrey remembers, as a "wild idea" that people were very receptive to. The Pritchards' former home on east Victory Way attracted hordes of families shopping for Christmas trees.

The evenings were a busy time, she remembers.

"We'd set them up outside the house and sell them under the yard light," Audrey said.

"It worked great then," Audrey said. "It was a little crazy, though."

Audrey said she might have been making Christmas cookies or watching the children when customers would come knocking on the door. Sometimes she'd get distracted making small-talk with the customers only to have to excuse herself to rescue the cookies from the oven, or to check on the kids.

Glenn remembers selling 400 or 500 trees in those days.

The business came to a halt for several years before the Pritchards started selling trees again in the late 1990s. Glenn's shoulder started giving him trouble, so he leaves most of the cutting to his son now. But in the early days of the operation, both Glenn and Audrey harvested the trees and hauled them to their truck, which had six-foot stock racks along the sides.

The idea of heading out as a family to cut a Christmas tree sounds romantic, but Glenn said he's seen more than one family buy a tree from him after their great Christmas tree adventures went awry.

It's not as easy as it seems.

Glenn said he probably looks at 30 trees for every one he cuts. And he prunes them in the field, before he saws them down. He might prune a couple branches, look at the tree and decide it's not a keeper so he leaves it standing. He'll come looking for it next year and maybe it will have filled in a little, Glenn said.

When he cuts a tree down, he likes to leave a small "sucker branch" intact near the bottom of the stump. In subsequent years, the branch will grown into a whole new tree. Glenn claims he's cut as many as three Christmas trees from the same stump.

"I'm not kidding," Glenn said. "One branch will actually fill out and make a new tree."

Although he prefers pinyon trees, he also cuts a some ponderosas and a couple fir trees. The firs are usually higher on the mountain, so they take more work to harvest.

"We've got a couple people who are just die-hard fir fans and that's all they want. So we try to accommodate them," Glenn said.

The ponderosas have long needles, which makes it hard to hang ornaments from them.

"But if somebody wants to wrap them (in garland), they're beautiful," Glenn said.

He seeks out the best pinyons. He said the prototype is a six-foot tree that's nicely filled in. Sometimes that's hard to find.

"Invariably, a pinyon will grow against a tree or a rock," Glenn said. "The ones in the open look best."

He advises his customers to cover the floor around the tree with a skirt Ã: not to catch needles, and not for decoration, but to catch the sap.

"They are sticky," he said. "They're sappy. That's what keeps 'em fresh. These aren't gonna turn brown and die on you."

Talking about the sap reminded him about the various uses Native Americans found for it. He explained that they boiled the sap down to a very thick consistency and used it to affix feathers to their arrows.

Glenn's a flint-knapper who makes knives and rock tools. As he sold trees on the corner of Pershing Street and Victory Way Tuesday, he carried a knife-shaped piece of obsidian he planned to finish soon. He had several of his finished pieces on hand Ã: one with a handle made of a deer antler.

Glenn likes to talk about his adventures hiking and hunting antlers in Brown's Park.

He muses about the untold riches in the outdoors in northwest Colorado. He's seen ancient horse traps, a corncrib used by Native Americans and even an unmarked grave that still fills him with curiosity.

Miles from any town, he and his son found a badly rusted double-loop chain with a lock in the middle. The chain had been broken deliberately, it seemed. And Glenn is convinced it's an artifact from the pioneer days. A convict escaped to the wilderness, broke his chains and ran free, he imagines.

Glenn talks of the days when neighbors, family and a handshake "meant something."

Glenn and Audrey's families both homesteaded near Craig early in the 1900s. Glenn said his mother came down on a covered wagon from Montana when she was three years old.

"The pioneers in this country were amazing. They were such strong people," Glenn said. "Those were neat days. I was born 100 years too late. I'm not a modern-day person, I guess."

Jeremy Browning can be reached at 824-7031 or jbrowning@craigdailypress.com