At sixty-seven hundred feet the Jeffrey pines around Big Bear Lake smell like vanilla in the sun and creak all night when the wind comes over the ridge. Big Bear Lake Tree Service works the seam where that forest meets cabins and driveways — removing a pine that has gone red at the top, trimming limbs back off a steep metal roof before the snow load arrives. Pruning up here is about clearance and health: keeping branches off the eaves, taking out what winter already killed. When a storm blows through and a limb comes down on the power drop or across the road toward Fawnskin, storm damage cleanup is the first truck out. Few things sound better than a mountain driveway going quiet and clear again, with the lake flat and blue below.