Ravenous beetles killing Colorado’s lodgepole pine forests

Published 11:14 pm Tuesday, January 15, 2008

DENVER — Every large, mature lodgepole pine forest in Colorado and southern Wyoming will be dead within three to five years, killed in a mountain pine beetle infestation unprecedented in the state.

In 2007 alone, the infestation once centered on the Western Slope tore through another 500,000 high-elevation acres and embedded itself along the Front Range, exploding in Boulder and Larimer counties where affected acres grew by 1,500 percent.

State and federal foresters, calling the numbers “catastrophic,” said recent aerial surveys reveal the dead and dying lodgepole acreage now has grown to 1.5 million since the first signs of outbreak in 1996.

With 22 million acres of forest in Colorado, the sturdy, rice-sized beetles won’t kill it all, but they could do away with most of the “pure lodgepole” stands as well as many of the trees within mixed systems of lodgepole, spruce, fir and ponderosa that cover several million acres in the state.

It will take decades for the stands to return.

Perhaps most at stake are the state’s water supplies. A lack of soil cover and the potential for forest fires as the dying trees dry out could leave reservoirs and rivers clogged with sediment more likely to pour off the landscape. Backcountry hikers will need to be more cautious about falling trees and mountain town economies could also be hurt by a browning backdrop less alluring to visitors.

In other places, including parts of Summit and Grand counties, the pine beetle has so ravaged the forest that the infestation is finished, “because the host trees are already dead,” said Susan Gray, a specialist in forest health for the Forest Service.