Red Alert
Bark beetles are killing off Colorado´s pines. Can we cope with the devastation?
Rick Caissie´s snowshoes stamp white tracks on a rust-red carpet of pine needles. December storms have pasted the Fraser Valley with more than four feet of snow. But snowshoeing near Granby, Caissie treads across a forest floor that´s red, not white.
"I see this a lot," says Caissie, a recently retired planning team leader for the U.S. Forest Service. Virtually every lodgepole pine around him stands dead, killed by bark beetles that starve trees of sustenance until their green needles become brittle, russet-colored straws that shower down like autumn leaves. "After a decent wind, the whole ground is covered in needles," Caissie says.
From his office window, Caissie watched beetles transform the verdant Blue Ridge, which borders the Fraser Valley to the west, into a swath of red skeletons. That extreme makeover happened in just three years. But the carnage no longer astonishes Caissie, a 35-year Forest Service veteran who supervised beetle mitigation efforts in the Sulphur Ranger District. He knows there´s no stopping the onslaught, so he´s resigned himself to a beetle-ridden reality. "Almost every tree now is either dead or infested," Caissie says. "Soon we won´t have anything left for beetles to hit."
Colorado´s mountain visitors, however, can rarely summon Caissie´s stoicism when they lay eyes on shocking, scabby blotches of beetle-killed trees. Front Rangers who haven´t crossed the Continental Divide since last summer--when green needles were still abundant enough to mask the coming devastation--now gape at the advancing rash that´s claimed entire mountainsides. Standing on nearly any summit in the north and central mountains, your gaze skims across staggering swaths of burnt umber as far as the eye can see.
The mountain pine beetle, a type of bark beetle, is the guilty party that´s blighting Caissie´s Grand County stomping grounds, as well as vast areas of Summit, Eagle, Routt, Jackson, and eight other Colorado counties, where it´s ultimately expected to claim more than 90 percent of the mature lodgepole pines, which make up 1.7 million acres of Colorado´s forests. It´s infested 1.5 million acres so far, with 4.8 million lodgepoles succumbing in 2006 alone. And Colorado represents only a modest portion of a broader beetle epidemic that spans the entire Rocky Mountains, from New Mexico to Canada.
Tiny menaces, bark beetles look like grains of black rice. But they can kill giant conifers by tunneling under their bark and laying eggs, which hatch into larvae that spend the winter noshing on the trees´ phloem, an inner bark layer that transports nutrients. Mountain pine beetles also carry a fungus that infects trees´ sapwood, staining it blue as it chokes off water to the trees´ upper reaches.
Bark beetles aren´t exotic imports; they´re native to the Rockies, and they´ve long helped to refresh forests by taking down weak trees and thinning dense stands. Large-scale outbreaks regularly rock the forest ecosystem: Several times a century, bark beetle populations explode and kill off huge numbers of trees. In Colorado, outbreaks hit as recently as the mid-1980s, when beetles wiped out pockets of evergreens near Breckenridge. Then, as always, severe cold snuffed the onslaught, freezing the wintering larvae and trimming the beetle population back to normal numbers. These days, though, it just doesn´t get cold enough anymore. "Temperatures of negative 10 to negative 30 degrees used to be common here at night," Caissie says. "Now it´s cause for conversation. We´d hit negative 40 at least once a year. We never see that now."
While cold snaps haven´t curtailed this latest outbreak, several factors have fueled it to epic proportions, making this round of beetle mania bigger than anything on record. Throughout the Rockies and in Grand County, where Colorado´s mountain pine beetles claimed their first stands, widespread logging during the mining and railroad era of the late 1800s toppled thousands of trees. The lodgepoles that replaced them created a one-species woodland ultimately susceptible to beetle blight. And thanks to a century of fire suppression and public disapproval of logging in the late 1900s, the new generation of trees grew old and fat. By the 1990s, central Colorado´s forests were full of lodgepoles more than 80 years old and eight delicious inches in diameter--the bark beetles´ favorite feast. "Beetles hit the big trees first, because they provide more food for larvae," Caissie explains. "If you could choose between an 800-square-foot home and one that´s 4,000 square feet, which one would you take?"
Usually, healthy trees can fight off the invaders with pitch, using sticky sap to stop beetles in their tracks. But the 1990s included one more fateful factor: drought. A series of hot, dry summers stressed trees and weakened their ability to pitch out beetles. Meanwhile, the heat gave beetles a leg up, stimulating their numbers and helping them overpower tree stands at all elevations--even above 10,000 feet, where chilly climes had historically put the kibosh on beetle explosions. Beetles also started assailing smaller trees they wouldn´t typically bother with. In short, this swarm is breaking all the rules on record.
That record only extends back some 150 years--which, in terms of forest ecosystems, is merely a blip. It´s possible that 500 or 1,000 years ago, the Rockies experienced a beetle epidemic on par with today´s. And even if this outbreak is the first one ever to reach such a magnitude, scientists say the forest will recover. "It´s not a catastrophe as far as nature´s concerned," Caissie says. For humans, however, vast expanses of dead trees pose threats that range from unsightly scenery to falling trees harming life and property, and to widespread wildfires. Says Caissie, "The catastrophe, if there is one, is for us."
A bluebird sky blazes over Fraser, but a faint haze fouls the cold December air. Throughout the valley, plumes of smoke billow up from the forest, as if factory smokestacks hide among the trees. But the air smells like campfire, not chemicals, and tracking each plume to its source, you´ll see a pile of lodgepoles blazing like a Viking bonfire. Private landowners find burning to be the fastest, cheapest, and easiest way to remove unwanted beetle-kill trees.
Drive down County Road 73 as it heads into the Fraser Experimental Forest, and you´ll see a logging machine snipping lodgepoles as neatly as you might pick daffodils. The machine´s operator wears a fleece shirt and a ball cap, and he looks bored as his hands repeat identical patterns over the control panel: One lever shaves limbs from the trunk; another lever cuts off the trunk´s flimsy end; a third lays it on the pile of prepped trees. A truck loaded with logs rumbles past, headed for U.S. 50 and Montrose, where Colorado´s only major sawmill operation swallows the logs and transforms them into dimension lumber.
Though tiny, beetles have sent shock waves rippling through virtually every aspect of mountain life. Not only have they changed the look of the landscape, they´ve forced mountain residents to accept, adapt, and deal with the ruins. From this "catastrophe" comes evolutionary coping; not only are we learning to manage the leftover dead trees, we are also becoming skilled at using them to our advantage.
Standing dead trees near roads, trails, and buildings can endanger people and their property. Dead trees can fall and injure hikers, bikers, and campers below. Snags can damage power lines and block roads. So communities are planning preemptive strikes. This fall, Grand County declared its mission to remove every dead or dying lodgepole pine four inches or more in diameter within 20 feet of county roads. The Forest Service has even clear-cut public campgrounds: At Green Ridge, for example, campers´ safety dictated that dead trees be removed--a buzz cut that left most sites nearly bald.
Finding buyers for all those felled pines can be difficult. Only large-diameter trees are useful for dimension lumber, and even then, "They´re only merchantable for three to five years," explains Tom Troxel, executive director of the Colorado Timber Industry Association. Beyond that time frame, the dead trees deteriorate too much to be structurally sound. And at any stage, small-diameter beetle-kill has little commercial value; property owners must pay to have such trees burned or chipped.
That could change, however, as biofuels become more popular. Low-emission wood pellet stoves are gaining ground among green builders and homeowners because they meet EPA standards and help achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. Summit, Grand, Gilpin, and Eagle counties have all expressed interest in installing biomass heating systems in municipal buildings. As a result, entrepreneur Mark Mathis founded Confluence Energy, a wood pellet company that´s building a $10 million pellet plant in Kremmling to transform beetle-kill of all sizes--even small-diameter trees--into heating pellets. By diverting some of the logging trucks to his plant, Mathis predicts his new industry will chew up 150,000 raw tons of trees per year, all of it beetle-kill.
Other entrepreneurs are also brewing lemonade from lemons. Gene Dayton, father of 2002 Olympic ski jumper Matt Dayton and operator of the Breckenridge and Frisco Nordic Centers, spent $150,000 on two Finnish lathes that strip trees of bark, beetles, and larvae to produce construction-ready, finished logs. His business is called Breckenridge Timber to Log, and according to Dayton, it´s "taking a tree that has a negative value of $15, once you pay for tree removal and chipping, and turning it into a positive value of several hundred dollars or more." Dayton redesigned his lathes in March 2007, and now, in addition to grooming ski trails and coaching the Summit County cross-country team, he churns out giant Lincoln Logs. He hopes some of those logs might find their way into affordable housing for Summit County locals.
Not everyone shares Mathis and Dayton´s desire to make use of as much beetle-kill as possible. Sloan Shoemaker, for one, thinks most trees should be left where they fall. "A lot of people want to see the commercial value of this material realized, and that´s OK," says Shoemaker, the executive director of the Wilderness Workshop, the conservation watchdog of the White River National Forest and adjacent public lands. Although Shoemaker supports removing select trees to protect life, property, and infrastructure, he says that ecologically it´s also important that trees remain in the forest, where they´ll preserve the snowpack and return nutrients to the soil.
Yet even Shoemaker, a conservationist, can´t determine whether this massive beetle epidemic is simply nature´s own variance or a consequence of something bigger, like global warming. "It´s certainly affected the trajectory of this outbreak," he says. "But are warming temperatures creating something never seen before? I can´t say that´s the case." We may be witnessing a blowout akin to a rare volcanic eruption or massive earthquake, cataclysms the Earth saves for special occasions. Or maybe, without realizing it, we´ve been stomping on the beetles´ gas pedal.
Environmental causes saturate the media today, yet until very recently our dying trees haven´t elicited much of a response. Which seems odd, given our deeply seated affection for Colorado´s evergreen mountains. The pleading eyes of a baby seal might rouse our concern for a healthy planet, but trees lack that kind of personality, and if a tree falls in the forest most of us don´t care. Only when the entire forest topples over do we wonder if something, somewhere, isn´t a little off-kilter.
Observers world-wide are wondering the same thing--and they´re eyeing the mercury. According to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 11 of the last 12 years (1995–2006) rank among the 12 warmest years on record. The report also predicts that global mean temperatures will continue to rise by 2.5 to 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. Even more than these figures, U.S. Forest Service research entomologist Barbara Bentz´s own findings convince her global warming is a big factor fueling this latest epidemic.
Bentz has studied temperature´s effect on beetle populations since the early ‘90s, and her work contributed to a mathematical model that predicted how warming temperatures would produce a beetle outbreak quite like the one happening now. And although she doesn´t feel rising averages are solely responsible for the mammoth proportions of the latest outbreak, she believes they´re a contributor--and that waves of dead trees are bio-indicators that something is certainly out of balance. "What we are seeing should be a big red flag," Bentz says. "Climate change isn´t just in the future. We´re observing it now."
Those waves of dead trees also up the potential for massive wildfires. Scientific opinions vary as to whether large numbers of beetle-killed trees portend catastrophic blazes. But most foresters agree that more flames are inescapable. "I think it´s likely that we´ll see more fires," predicts Andy Cadenhead, supervisory forester for the Routt-Medicine Bow National Forest. "Of course that depends on the weather we get over the next five, 10, 20 years," he adds. But generally, Cadenhead says, lots of dead wood in the forest corresponds with more frequent--and bigger--fires.
Trees with dead, red needles are good candidates for crown fires, which race quickly across the treetops. In four to six years, after the needles drop, fire hazard dips a bit. But once the trunks themselves start crashing down, six to 20 years after succumbing to beetles, the fire hazard rises again--only this time, the jackstrawed trees feed slow-moving ground fires, which burn so hot they can damage soils and watersheds. "We can reduce fuels where our values are in conflict with fire," says Cadenhead. "But we can´t fireproof the entire forest."
Hoping to stave off catastrophic infernos, communities are spending big to remove beetle-infested trees near homes and businesses. The town of Vail spent $380,000 on beetle mitigation in 2007, much of that to harvest 7,00 trees that could only be removed by helicopter. "It´s expensive," admits Eagle County wildfire mitigation specialist Eric Lovgren. "But when you´re talking about a community valued in the hundreds of millions, it makes sense." Even the YMCA´s not-for-profit Snow Mountain Ranch near Tabernash found that logging pays off: When a blaze ignited there in June ‘07, firefighters were able to contain the flames. "Cutting probably saved eight structures," estimates ranch center director Julie Watkins. She interprets the fire as both a promise and a threat: Removing trees kept blazes at bay, but that wolf still lurks at the door.
With or without fires, the change to the landscape has only just begun. In central Colorado the evergreen forests have all but disappeared. And conifers elsewhere--in the Elks and San Juans, for example--may be the next to go. Three to five years from now, the dead, red trees will turn gray, making the forest resemble a gargantuan porcupine´s hide. In 20 years, after most of the dead have fallen, we´ll get blown-open views of the surrounding mountains--assuming we can penetrate the rubble. Hunters will curse the tangled trees that frustrate their efforts to track and follow game. And we´ll endure an awkward adolescence as junior trees poke skyward and re-create the forest canopy. Eventually, the stately forests we loved will return.
It´s disturbing to witness the destruction of one of our most enduring symbols of life, the evergreen. But the forest´s wardrobe change hardly signals its extinction; it just roils humans´ beloved status quo. We like constancy, so it seems hard--a catastrophe, even--to lose our gladed ski runs, our lush, tourist-luring views, possibly even our mountain homes to nature´s fluctuations. Nature can ride it out. We´re the ones who will have more than a little trouble coping with the restructuring.
But if change is an inevitable part of nature´s performance, the forest´s regeneration is the next act. Not far from the red-floored forest where Caissie snowshoes, beneath gray trees killed by beetles five years ago, seedlings have started to emerge. Their jewel-green needles reach out from a slender central stem like bristles on a bottle-brush. They´re the forest´s trees-in-training. And they´re proof that, no matter how hard the winter, spring always arrives.
Beauty in Blue
An Evergreen woodcarver turns beetle-kill into art.
Dennie Ibbotson´s log studio contains a pot-belly stove, surround-sound speakers, and stacks of beetle-kill wood. For 30 years, the master woodworker has specialized in hand-carved signs and doors emblazoned with wildlife such as elk, mountain lion, and even African cheetahs. But these days, the Evergreen, Colorado artist prefers to work his signature animal carvings on beetle-kill wood. "I think it´s the most beautiful wood in the world," Ibbotson says, "because it´s Mother Nature talking."
Nature is Ibbotson´s major source of inspiration. He doesn´t make freestanding sculpture, because such pieces require the use of loud machinery that roars over the rustle of aspens outside his studio window. Wielding his mallet and gouge, Ibbotson listens to the wood as well. "I look at beetle kill as a symphony," he says. "I´m just doing a solo."
Ibbotson claims he never replicates the same carving twice. And beetle-kill wood is similarly unique, with blue striations that vary from panel to panel. "Beetle-kill wood has a totally different texture than live wood," the artist says. "It´s hard to carve. But I have to understand how nature has made each piece different."
Ibbotson isn´t the only artisan to find beauty in beetles´ handiwork. Homebuilders are showcasing the exotic, blue-stained timber in stair banisters, ceilings, and interior trim, and woodworkers such as Rob Peeters of Winter Park and Jerry Naro of Nederland craft furniture, custom cabinetry, and even hammock stands from beetle-kill wood.
Coloradoans have always loved bringing nature indoors--antler chandeliers, rough-hewn log beds, animal-hide rugs. Now we have one more way to show off Colorado´s bounty.
Laughing Sun Studio, www.handcarveddoors.com, 303/670-1445.
Naked Aspen Designs, www.nakedaspendesigns.com, 877/726-1039.
Whispering Wind Designs, www.wwfd.net, 303/258-7014.
Blown Wide Open
Ski areas battle to save their trees.
Colorado´s ski resorts define our identity, like California´s surf beaches or Vermont´s fall foliage. Our dry, light snow is the headliner, but trees play an important, if unheralded, role on the ski scene. Separating and defining existing runs, sheltering them from scouring winds, and preserving pockets of powder snow, trees sculpt our mountains. But with bark beetles threatening Colorado´s forests, will open bowl skiing across treeless expanses become skiers´ only terrain option?
"We´ll be okay," says Doug Laraby, planning director for Winter Park Resort. "We´ll have trails separated by tree islands. Some trees just might not be as tall as others."
About 25 percent of Winter Park´s 3,000 forested acres are susceptible to mountain pine beetles--meaning those trees´ days are numbered. The remaining trees are lodgepoles too young and small to interest beetles, and at higher elevations, spruce and fir that have not yet experienced infestation. Since 2004, when beetles first infiltrated ski area boundaries, Winter Park has removed about 5,000 trees, and expects that number to grow: Next year, the resort will harvest trees in the Vasquez Ridge area as part of a 75-acre timber sale.
"It´s a huge outbreak," Laraby admits. But the resort spent $25,000 to spray 30 acres of high-elevation lodgepoles critical to protecting trails and lifts from wind, an effort Laraby says has preserved many of those key trees. And new trails have been created as tree populations change shape.
Steamboat has redesigned ski runs as beetles munch its lodgepole pines, which represent a relatively small fraction of the resort´s total forested acres. "We won´t be creating big new trails," says Lance Miles, Steamboat´s Project Coordinator. He says Steamboat skiers will see more open gladed areas and wider existing trails. "From year to year, the changes will be fairly gradual," Miles predicts. "If you were to shoot aerial photos of the ski area over a 10-year span, then yes, you will see a difference."
At Aspen-Snowmass, skiers see no beetle impact at all--for now. Beetles haven´t yet hit the Elk Mountains. "We´ve watched [the outbreak] move west for a decade now," says Rich Burkley, Aspen´s Vice President of Operations. "And a few beetle-infested trees were recently found down in town. So it´s only a matter of time before it heads our way."
Some skiers may actually benefit from the beetles´ rampage. After all, Colorado´s tree runs will become a whole lot more forgiving. Which means if you don´t dig tight trees, you´ll love the changes.
