Reprinted from a June 10, 2007 column in the Morgantown Dominion Post
Last September I bowhunted on a friends ranch near Silverthorne, Colorado. The mountains around his home are some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. Well, they used to be. Those mountains are covered with lodgepole pines, but last fall they were almost entirely dead. Those not dead were dying. Instead of green trees, I saw rust red colored trees, and apparently they run from New Mexico to Canada.
The second morning there Steve took me for a drive throughout the area. We went forty miles in one direction and my estimate was that 90 percent of all trees were dead. Then this past March, my friends and I went turkey hunting in Wyoming. Again we saw some dead trees. Nothing as bad as Colorado, but the beginning of the end was visible.
All over the Rocky Mountains the lodgepole pine is the major tree species. Hundreds of thousands of acres of those trees are now dead or dying and the cause is the Mountain Pine Beetle. I’m an old Beetle fan. I grew up with their music and I still love listening to the Beetles. However, this beetle is creating a "hard days night" for timber and people who live in the West.
Why is this beetle outbreak happening now? The main reasons is that the forests of the West are in poor condition. Before there was our Smokey The Bear mentality, slow moving ground fires thinned the forests and crown fires burned patches of old growth timber. This was a good thing as it created a diverse forest with trees of mixed sizes and ages. The beetles prefer older trees, so when you have a diverse forest beetle numbers stay low because the older trees are dispersed.
For years forest ecologists have predicted some kind of major problem because our forests are in such terrible shape. Now it’s happened. Without fires you get a monoculture of trees of one age class. This imbalance leads to stressed trees and the mountain pine beetle has done the rest.
In Colorado (actually in all western states), fire suppression has been a problem, but so has a decade of droughts. Droughts weaken trees, and create a great situation for beetle infestations.
So, poor timber management and droughts brought this all on. Actually we’ve needed some fires all along. With patchy, periodic, cool fires, you end up with a healthier forest and healthy trees have good resin flow and this repels beetles. If you have a drought, the trees are stressed and beetles increase. Small outbreaks occur, but if the forest is healthy, these beetle infestations are spotty and die down with little overall damage. In fact, in a healthy forest, the beetles can be beneficial. Beetle-killed trees provide food for birds and snags for roosting and nesting habitat. They help recycle old forests and build fuels (I. E. dead trees) needed for fires that occurs in patchy areas, rather than the huge fires that sweep the landscape.
While I was visiting my friends Colorado ranch, he showed me where his neighbor was creating fire lanes around his home. Why? Because the beetle infestations created a huge fire hazard. If wind conditions are right, with the amount of dead trees on the mountains, we may see some huge fires this summer. There is definitely tons of fuel as there is dead wood is everywhere. If fires do not happen this summer, then it will be even worse next summer.
When trees are killed by beetles there is a window of time where the timber can still be salvaged. And salvage operations are taking place, but with 7.4 million dead trees on 1.5 million acres of national forests in Colorado, there is no way to salvage most trees. Just too much dead timber out there.
To reduce the growing fire hazard, it is important to get as much fuel out of the woods as possible, both in areas where the beetles have killed trees, but also in areas where the beetles have not yet invaded. So, clear-cutting has been suggested and is being done. However, even though economical, this practice still upsets much of the public and there is opposition in many areas.
What will be the end result? Well, ski areas are spending huge amounts of money to spray and attempt to save trees. Housing developments built in the woods are also attempting to save their trees. But millions of lodgepole pines will die in Colorado, and many millions more will die in the future in other western states. On my friends place I suspect that in the next 2-4 years a fire will go thru and burn everything. His house will be safe, and most neighbors will as well because they’ve removed all fire fuel around the homes, but the mountain will go. Then when the forests grow back, they will all be the same age. Without subsequent thinning, some timber cutting and the creation of a diverse forest, in 40-50 years we could see the same thing happen all over again.
In short, the mountain pine beetle cannot be stopped. It will totally wipe out huge areas of pines, and in the end, create a situation where we can start all over and do it right this time. In the meantime, the devastation and timber loss will be huge.
