Utah Christmas Tree Permits 2026: Forest Service & BLM

Living September 2, 2026 14 min read ✓ Updated October 12, 2026

Elly Giordano Contributing Writer, Provo.com How we make Provo.com

There are two ways to get a real Christmas tree near Provo. One is the way most of the country does it: drive to a lot or a nursery in late November, pick a sheared Fraser fir that was cut in Oregon two weeks ago, and tie it to the roof. The other is the way a large share of Utah families do it: buy a $20 federal permit in early November, drive an hour or two to a national forest, hike into a designated cutting area with a saw and a thermos, and bring home a subalpine fir that no one has ever pruned.

This guide covers both, with an honest accounting of a third option that people ask about and that barely exists here — the cut-your-own tree farm. Utah County has a permit tradition, not a farm tradition, and the reasons are geography and water. So the spine of this page is the permit: what it costs, where it is valid, what the rules are, and how to do the trip without a citation or a stuck truck.

Dates below are the pattern of recent seasons. For 2026, Forest Service in-person sales start November 9; the BLM's online sales run from November 17 through December 24. Confirm the specifics on the agencies' pages before you plan the Saturday.

The Forest Service Permit

The Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest is the forest that surrounds Utah Valley — the Wasatch above Provo, the Uintas to the east, the Stansburys to the west — and it sells Christmas tree permits every year. The basics, from the forest's own permits page:

$20 per tree, one permit per household. A $2.50 fee is added for online sales.
Sold on recreation.gov. Search "Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest Christmas Tree Permit." Some district offices have sold in person; online is the primary channel, and for some districts the only one.
Valid only for the forest and district you bought it for. A Heber-Kamas permit does not work on the Evanston district.
Up to a 20-foot tree; no topping. You cut the whole tree at the base.
No cutting in campgrounds, trailheads, or administrative sites, within 200 feet of lakes and streams, in wilderness, or in planted areas.
Permits and trees may not be resold.
Print it or carry it on your phone. A payment confirmation is not a permit, and there is no cell service in most cutting areas, so print it.
State and BLM permits are not valid on Forest Service land.

The 2026 details are already posted on recreation.gov: in-person sales begin November 9, 2026, and Heber-Kamas permits are being sold in three identical batches because they sell out fast; if Heber-Kamas is gone, the forest points buyers to Evanston-Mountain View. Five districts are open this year: Heber-Kamas, Evanston-Mountain View, the Stansburys on the Salt Lake district, Logan and Ogden. In 2025, permits went on sale online November 10 at 8 a.m. and were valid through the end of December; in earlier years the sale opened in the first days of November and ran through December 25. Expect the same window.

Which Districts, and Where You Can Cut

This is the part that surprises Provo families. The ranger districts closest to Utah County — Pleasant Grove, which covers American Fork Canyon and the Alpine Loop, and Spanish Fork, which covers Hobble Creek, Diamond Fork, and the Nebo Loop — have not been on the forest's Christmas tree permit list in recent seasons. Their canyons are steep, heavily used, and largely closed to tree cutting. Neither is on the 2026 list.

The districts that have sold permits in recent years, and what each allows:

Heber-Kamas Ranger District. The realistic choice for a Provo family. Cutting areas are along the Mirror Lake Highway (Utah 150) above Kamas and in the Strawberry area east of Heber, with maps for each on the forest's site and recreation.gov. Only subalpine fir, 20 feet or shorter, may be cut; no cutting within 200 feet of lakes, streams, campgrounds, picnic areas, or U.S. 40. The Mirror Lake Highway closes at its winter gates, and the cutting areas are below them. Drive time from Provo: about an hour and a quarter to the Kamas side via Heber and U.S. 40, a bit less to Strawberry. Offices in Heber and Kamas.

Evanston-Mountain View Ranger District. The north slope of the Uintas, on the Wyoming side. Any species of evergreen, up to 20 feet; lodgepole pine dominates. Season early November to December 25. It is a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Provo via I-80 and Evanston, which puts it in the category of a full-day trip or a combination with a visit to family in Evanston. Offices in Evanston and Mountain View, Wyoming.

Salt Lake Ranger District. Cutting is limited to the Stansbury Mountains in Tooele County, and only juniper may be cut; limber pine may not. It is about an hour and a half from Provo. The tree is a juniper, which is a very different tree from a fir; see below.

Logan Ranger District. Cache Valley; online sales only; roughly two and a half hours from Provo. Not a Utah Valley trip unless you are already going.

Ogden Ranger District. Also on the 2026 list. Like Logan, it is a long drive north and mainly useful if you are already in Weber County.

The forest's page for each district links a map of the cutting area. Print it. The permit is only valid inside the lines.

The BLM Permit: Pinyon and Juniper

The Bureau of Land Management sells its own Christmas tree permit, and it is the drier, more western alternative. The BLM's current Utah page does not list a single price; each field office sets its own fee, so check with the Fillmore or Salt Lake office. Permits are sold online at the BLM's permit site and in person at field offices during business hours, beginning in mid-November — November 17 in a recent year — and running through December 24.

The trees are pinyon pine and juniper, the trees of Utah's high desert. The nearest BLM cutting areas to Provo are managed by the Fillmore Field Office, which has opened all BLM-managed land in Juab and Millard counties to cutting with a permit, and by the Salt Lake Field Office in Tooele County. From Provo, that means a drive south on I-15 past Nephi and west toward the Sevier Desert, or west on I-80 and south through Tooele — an hour to two hours, on dirt roads at the end.

The BLM publishes a cutting-area map and a downloadable offline map package for phones, which matters because there is no signal out there. A BLM permit is not valid on Forest Service land, and a Forest Service permit is not valid on BLM land; the boundaries are on the maps.

A juniper or pinyon Christmas tree is dense, fragrant, irregular, and often broader than it is tall. Families who grew up with one will not have anything else; families expecting a fir are sometimes surprised.

What the Trees Are Like

A tree from the forest is not a tree from a lot, and it helps to know what you are choosing.

Subalpine fir (Heber-Kamas) is the classic Utah cut tree: soft, flat, blunt needles that do not prick, a narrow, spire-like shape, a pleasant fir scent, and good needle retention if you cut it fresh and keep it in water. Because it grew wild in a crowded stand, it will be thin on one or two sides and may have gaps between whorls. The tradition is to find one with a good face and turn the bad side to the wall. Subalpine fir needles are soft and flat; spruce needles, which you are not supposed to cut on that district, are sharp and square and roll between your fingers.

Lodgepole pine (Evanston) is fuller and rounder with longer needles, and it drops them faster indoors; it is a two-to-three-week tree, not a five-week tree.

Juniper (Stansburys, BLM) and pinyon pine (BLM) are bushy, dense, and strongly scented, with tiny scale-like or short bundled needles. They hold up well and they smell like the West. They are also heavy and prickly to handle.

None of them will look like the sheared, symmetrical Fraser or noble fir on a lot, which was pruned annually for eight years to look that way. That is the trade: a tree with a story and a bad side, or a tree with neither.

The Trip: What to Bring, When to Go, How Not to Get Stuck

Bring a handsaw (some districts allow chainsaws; the permit says), rope or ratchet straps, a tarp for the roof or bed, work gloves, a tape measure so you do not cut a 14-foot tree for a 9-foot ceiling, a printed permit, a printed map, and warm layers for everyone, including the child who will refuse the coat until the second hour. Snacks and a thermos are not optional with children. A sled for hauling the tree out is a good idea if the snow is deep.

Drive something that can handle a snowy forest road. The cutting areas are reached by dirt roads that are plowed sporadically or not at all, and a two-wheel-drive sedan on all-season tires is how people end up calling for a tow with no cell service. Our winter tires and canyon driving guide is the honest version of that conversation. Check road conditions the morning you go.

Go early in the season. The accessible trees near the roads are cut in the first two weekends; by mid-December the good ones are a long walk in deeper snow. Weekdays and early Saturday mornings are quiet.

Cut correctly. Cut the whole tree at the base and leave a stump no taller than 6 inches. Do not top a tall tree for its crown; that is prohibited on every district and it kills the tree. Stay inside the mapped area and out of the buffers around water, roads, and campgrounds. Keep the permit with you; forest officers do check, and a payment confirmation on a dead phone does not count.

Get it home. Tie the tree trunk-forward on the roof with the branches streaming back, wrapped in the tarp; a tree tied crown-forward arrives bald. When you get home, make a fresh cut an inch above the old one and get it into water within an hour or two. A forest fir that is cut fresh and watered will outlast anything from a lot.

The Tree Farms That Barely Exist

People ask every year where the cut-your-own farms are, and the answer, for Utah County, is that there is almost nothing. Christmas trees take eight to ten years to grow to size, need water in a dry state, and occupy land that in Utah County is worth far more as houses. The Wasatch Front has a handful of small farms — one in Alpine that has opened on weekends in past seasons and announces on Facebook whether it will open at all, a couple in Morgan and Davis counties that grow Colorado spruce and fir and sell out in days — and none of them is a sure thing in any given year.

We are not listing them as open for 2026 because we cannot confirm it in September, and a family that drives to Alpine on a Saturday in December to find a closed gate has had a worse day than one that bought a permit. If you want the farm experience, watch the Wasatch Front farms' social pages from mid-November, call before you go, and expect to pay more than a lot tree for the privilege. Have the permit plan as the backup.

The Lots

For a fresh tree without a hike, Utah County's seasonal lots open the week of Thanksgiving and run until they sell out, usually a week or two before Christmas.

Nurseries, orchard stores and seasonal lots in Orem, Payson and the south county have sold trees in recent years; confirm any of them by phone before driving. The home-improvement chains and several grocers sell pre-cut trees, and at least one Salt Lake-based operation delivers fresh-cut trees to addresses across Utah County, from Alpine to Eagle Mountain to Payson.

Lots sell Fraser fir, noble fir, grand fir, Nordmann fir, and Douglas fir, most of it trucked from Oregon and Washington. Buy early for selection, ask when the trees arrived, check that the needles bend rather than snap, and make a fresh cut at home.

Keeping It Alive Until New Year's

Whichever tree you bring home, the first hour decides how long it lasts. Make a fresh cut across the base — a half-inch to an inch, straight — because a trunk that has been out of water for more than a few hours seals over with resin and will not drink. Get it into a stand that holds at least a gallon, fill the stand, and check it twice a day for the first three days; a fresh tree can take a gallon in the first 24 hours. Keep it away from heat vents, fireplaces, and south windows. Skip the additives; plain water does the job.

A subalpine fir cut fresh and kept watered holds its needles well; a lodgepole drops sooner. Lot firs vary with how long ago they were cut, which is why asking the lot when the truck came in matters.

When the season ends, most Utah County cities run a curbside tree pickup or a drop-off site in the first two weeks of January, and several turn the trees into mulch or sink them in reservoirs as fish habitat; the city's public-works page has the dates. Do not leave one in the canyon.

A Realistic Timeline for a Provo Family

Now: read the 2026 details on recreation.gov and pick Heber-Kamas or Strawberry, with Evanston as the backup. November 9: in-person sales begin, and Heber-Kamas batches sell out fast; buy one, download and print the map. November 17: the BLM's online sales open for the pinyon-and-juniper crowd. Thanksgiving week: the lots open. The first or second Saturday after Thanksgiving: the trip — leave by 8, cut by 11, home by 3. Late December: the permit expires; the lots are empty. First two weeks of January: the city picks up the tree.

The families who do this every year are the ones who bought the permit the morning it went on sale and went the first good Saturday. The families who regret it are the ones who went December 20.

The Permit as a Tradition

The reason so many Utah families do the permit instead of the lot is not money, though $22.50 for a tree is hard to beat. It is that the permit turns a purchase into a day: the drive up the canyon, the argument about which tree, the child who finds the perfect one and is overruled, the hot chocolate at the truck, the tree on the roof, and the same photo taken every year in the same spot. The tree is thinner than a lot tree and it does not matter.

It also keeps the forest healthier — thinning crowded young stands of fir is why the agencies sell the permits at all — and it is one of the few things a family can do on public land in December that costs less than a movie.

Buy the permit the week it goes on sale. Print two copies. Go early.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much is a Christmas tree permit in the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest?

$20 per tree, one permit per household, plus a $2.50 processing fee when you buy it online through recreation.gov, which is now the only or primary sales channel for most of the forest's ranger districts. For 2026, recreation.gov lists in-person sales starting November 9 at the Kamas office and two Heber-Kamas retailers and at the Evanston and Mountain View offices, with Heber-Kamas permits sold in three batches that are expected to sell out quickly. In recent years permits have remained valid through late December. The permit covers a tree up to 20 feet tall and is valid only for the ranger district you bought it for.

Where near Provo can I cut a tree?

Not as close as you would hope. In recent seasons the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache has sold Christmas tree permits for four ranger districts: Heber-Kamas (the Mirror Lake Highway and Strawberry areas, subalpine fir only), Evanston-Mountain View (Wyoming side of the Uintas, any evergreen, mostly lodgepole), Salt Lake (the Stansbury Mountains in Tooele County, juniper only), and Logan. The Pleasant Grove and Spanish Fork districts, which cover the Wasatch above Utah County, have not consistently been on that list, and their steep, heavily used canyons are generally closed to cutting. For a Provo family, the realistic Forest Service cut is the Heber-Kamas district, an hour or more away via Heber and Kamas, or Strawberry.

What is the BLM Christmas tree permit, and is it different?

The Bureau of Land Management sells a separate permit, priced by each field office, for cutting pinyon pine and juniper on BLM land, sold online through the BLM's forest-products site and in person at field offices from mid-November through Christmas Eve. The nearest BLM cutting areas to Provo are in Juab and Millard counties through the Fillmore Field Office, and in Tooele County through the Salt Lake Field Office. The trees are pinyon and juniper — the classic high-desert Christmas tree, dense, fragrant, and nothing like a fir — and the drive is west and south rather than up a canyon. A Forest Service permit is not valid on BLM land and vice versa.

What are the cutting rules?

The rules are on the permit and the map that comes with it, and they are specific to each district. The universal ones: the tree must be 20 feet or shorter and you cut the whole tree, no topping; you may not cut within 200 feet of a lake, stream, campground, picnic area, or trailhead, or along certain highways; no cutting in wilderness areas, planted areas, or administrative sites; the permit must be printed or on your phone and a payment confirmation alone does not count; and the tree may not be resold. Some districts restrict species — Heber-Kamas allows only subalpine fir, the Stansburys only juniper. Cutting a tree without a permit or outside the designated area is a federal citation.

Are there real cut-your-own Christmas tree farms in Utah County?

Very few, and none that we can confirm as operating for 2026 as of early September. Utah's climate and land prices do not favor tree farming, and the handful of Wasatch Front farms that have offered cut-your-own — one in Alpine that has opened on weekends in past seasons, a couple in Morgan and Davis counties — announce each year on their social pages whether they will open and often sell out in a weekend. If you want the farm experience, watch those pages from mid-November, call before you drive, and have the permit plan as the backup. If you want a fresh tree without a hike, the lots are the reliable option.

Where are the tree lots near Provo?

Seasonal lots open the week of Thanksgiving in Orem, Provo, Payson, and the north county, usually in grocery-store and nursery parking lots. Nurseries, orchard stores and seasonal lots have sold trees in recent years. Home improvement stores and some grocers sell pre-cut trees as well, and at least one Salt Lake operation delivers pre-cut trees to Utah County addresses. Lots are seasonal businesses that come and go; the names here are the ones that have appeared in recent listings, and any of them should be confirmed by phone before you drive.

What kind of tree will I get from the forest?

On the Heber-Kamas district, a subalpine fir — soft, flat needles, a narrow spire shape, good needle retention if you cut it fresh and keep it watered, and a tendency to have sparse sides where it grew crowded. On the Evanston side, most likely a lodgepole pine, which is fuller but drops needles faster. In the Stansburys and on BLM land, a juniper or pinyon, which is dense, bushy, and smells like the West. None of them looks like the sheared Fraser fir from a lot. Forest trees are wilder, thinner, and often lopsided; part of the tradition is picking one with a good side and turning it to the wall.

What should I bring, and when should I go?

A handsaw (chainsaws are allowed on some districts and not others; the permit says), rope or straps, a tarp for the truck bed or roof, gloves, a measuring tape, warm clothes for everyone, a printed permit, a printed map, snacks, and a car that can handle a snowy dirt road with real tires or chains. Cell service is absent in most cutting areas, which is why the paper matters. Go on a weekday or early on a Saturday in the first two weeks after the season opens; by mid-December the accessible trees near the roads are gone and the snow is deeper. Check road conditions the morning of — the Mirror Lake Highway closes at the gates for the winter and the cutting areas are below them.

Sources

The facts in this guide were checked against these sources. Hours, fees and rules change, so confirm anything time-sensitive with the source before you go. How we make Provo.com.

Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest — Permits (Christmas Tree Cutting), USDA Forest Service. Checked October 12, 2026.
Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest Christmas Tree Permit, Recreation.gov (USDA Forest Service). Checked October 12, 2026.
Utah Christmas Tree Permits, Bureau of Land Management, Utah. Checked October 12, 2026.

Elly Giordano

Contributing Writer

Elly Giordano is a contributing writer at Provo.com covering outdoor recreation, health and wellness, and Utah Valley's growing food and drink scene. An avid hiker and trail runner who knows the Wasatch foothills well, She reads and reviews every guide on her beat before it is published. When she's not on the trails, she's on the volleyball court, where she plays setter for her college team.

Christmas Tree Farms and Cut-Your-Own Permits Near Provo: The Forest Service Permit, the BLM Permit, and the Lots (2026)