CHEMULT, Ore. — A bright autumn sun filters through thick stands of lodge pole pine and slants across Karen Sutton's back as she crawls along the forest floor, eyes glued to the ground.
Every few inches, Sutton stops and reaches out for another tiny red-and-purple tinted pine cone, until her hands are so full of the prickly pods that she can't crawl any farther.
Sutton and her husband, Roger, spend hours each summer and fall hiking the forests of Central Oregon filling bushel bags with pine cones that will end up, months later, in holiday wreaths, centerpieces, garlands and potpourri jars nationwide.
"These can wind up anywhere. It's amazing to me the number of people who will buy these things," Sutton said. "That's the world we live in — you can walk around in the forest and make money!"
Hundreds of thousands of harvesters roam the nation's forests each year, spinning evergreen boughs, cones, bark, berries, wild grasses and onions, roots and herbs into a multibillion-dollar industry.
Many of the collectors are poor, undocumented immigrants; most products wind up hundreds of miles from the forest, sold in upscale floral arrangements and wreaths or made into baskets and medicines.
"It's a big, big deal," said Sue Alexander, a natural resource economist with the Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station. "We're talking about millions and millions of dollars in the Pacific Northwest alone."
Experts estimate that the harvest of non-timber forest products nationwide generates at least $5 billion annually — a conservative figure considering that at least half of the harvest is thought to be illegal and undocumented, Alexander said.
About half the products are gathered in the Pacific Northwest, particularly the evergreen boughs and pine cones that are so popular around the holidays.
Harvesters took more than 10,500 tons of pine, cedar and fir boughs from federal and state forests in Oregon and Washington in 2001, and more than 13,800 bushels of pine cones.
Holiday greens and floral grasses from the Pacific Northwest generate between $129 million and $500 million a year, experts say, though tracking the industry is difficult because of the collectors' transient lifestyle.
Collecting small amounts of wild crops such as decorative beargrass, the broad-leafed salal and huckleberries has been a cottage industry for more than 100 years, Alexander said.
Over the past 30 years, however, the number of commercial-scale harvesters has shot up as southeast Asian and Central and South American immigrants entered the industry. Federal agencies estimate that about 10,000 harvesters work legally in the Pacific Northwest's national forests; officials say twice as many likely harvest without permits.
As a result, state and federal forest officials struggle to document the number of harvesters in the woods and monitor collecting methods that are often illegal or, at best, questionable.
Many of the wreaths and garlands holiday shoppers buy at major chain stores are the product of a system that encourages tax evasion, poor labor practices and environmental abuse, industry insiders say.
"We have a half-billion dollar industry of which about 80 percent of the product is harvested illegally. Nobody's paying taxes . . . nobody's paying anything," said Peter van Well, owner of Golden Eagle Evergreens in Puyallup, Wash.
"There are plenty of rules and regulations, but they are not enforced and at the same time the land is being ruined and the product is being ruined," said van Well, who says he buys only legally harvested materials from documented and insured collectors.
Illegal harvesting is common on public lands, but is most noticeable on private timber land, said Craig Marbet, special forest products forester for Simpson Resource Co. in Shelton, Wash.
For the cost of a permit, the company allows harvesters to collect tree boughs on about 15 percent of its 300,000 acres, but it loses hundreds of thousands of dollars each season from collectors who overharvest or sneak into off-limits areas, he said.
Most recently, Marbet surprised a six-man crew that had illegally cut nearly 4 1/2 tons of cedar boughs from trees along a sensitive stream bank. The crew boss had $8,000 in cash hidden in his glove compartment; one of the crew members had been arrested and released for a similar offense several days before, Marbet said.
"Every year it seems to be getting incrementally worse. We've got an insatiable desire for this product, we have a limited resource and we've got an unlimited work force that's mostly unregulated," he said. "I hope people think when they buy their wreaths that maybe they're not buying a sustainable product."
Others in the industry, however, say many operators follow the rules and are just trying to make a living in an unpredictable market with fierce competition.
"Many of the greens companies are knowingly or unknowingly buying stolen or poached material, absolutely," said Mark Savage, special forest products forester for the Washington Department of Natural Resources. "But it's not all black and white — there's some real good operators out there."
Buyer Peter van Well, for example, pays Social Security and insurance for his 50 contract harvesters and has pushed for stricter enforcement by state and federal officials.
Jerry Hilliker, a pine cone broker in La Pine, Ore., bought six million ponderosa pine cones from harvesters this season and sold most of them to a company that sprays them in cinnamon-scented oil. The cones sell at major grocery chains across the country for between $4 and $6 a bag during the holidays, he said.
Hilliker pays collectors about 2 1/2 cents per cone; 90 seasonal employees dip, package and ship the pine cones in the late fall.
Most of Hilliker's harvesters are locals who do the job to earn extra holiday money and they help clear the forest floor of dried-up cones that could fuel a wildfire, he said.
"It's all geared for the holidays. It takes me about five to six months to get all the cones that I need and they're gone in about 15 days," Hilliker said.
For their part, collectors say it's not fair that wilderness harvesters have a bad reputation because of the transgressions of a few.
Koy Chounlabout and her husband travel a circuit through Oregon, Washington and Montana, living in campgrounds for most of the year while they pick mushrooms, pine cones, huckleberries and beargrass.
Chounlabout also works for the Forest Service three months a year, educating fellow harvesters about the proper ways to search for and pick matsutake mushrooms in central Oregon.
"It's better than living in a big town and working all the time," she said of the harvester's life. "I don't want to be in the office — it's like jail. I'm the boss and I'm the employee. It's free."