Tree Identification – North Carolina Conifer (Solved!)

Identified: Colorado Blue Spruce!

Update: This North Carolina Conifer has been successfully identified as a Colorado Blue Spruce by the awesome folks at Botany Everyday!

There is a beautiful beast of a tree in my back yard here in Western North Carolina.  It towers above the basketball post that we dug out of the honeysuckle (along with the 20+ foot of chain-link fence, a truck cap, and a dog house).

We’ve had to fight a constant battle with the honeysuckle in that corner of the yard.  I don’t mind SOME of it there – I use the flowers and enjoy feeding it to the goats next door.  It’s grown up the blackberry canes, poke stalks, and even the poor tree has been snarled up.

Once we fought the tide of vines back, Eric began doing some maintenance on the tree, a lovely smelling, deep shade giving conifer of some kind.

I took some of the trimmed branches inside and have been trying to no avail to figure out what kind of tree this is.  So here’s what I know:

The needles are green, no silver stripes, no light tips, nothing but solid green.  The cones I’ve seen on it are itty bitty, as below.

The trunk is silvery green, and weeps sticky sap.  It bleeds even stickier sap when branches are cut.

There are Carolina Hemlock around here, and they are in danger from the hemlock woolly adelgid but there was no trace of any of them on this tree.  It also doesn’t appear to droop like the hemlocks do.

Is it a Spruce?  It doesn’t seem to be a Fir.  I’m really curious!