Pine Beetles Taking Toll in Vail

The Gore Range Science School has a collection of bark and sap containing dead pine beetles.

Pine beetles create blue stains throughout the trunk of lodgepole pine trees.

Vail Ski Area is covered by a massive amount of trees killed by pine beetles.

The Vail landscape is more colorful these days than it was, say ... 10 years ago. In recent years the forest lining the valley has begun sporting a number of red trees. This is not a good thing. Those red trees are dead. And there’s only one species to blame. No … it’s not humans this time.

It’s the pine beetle, a tiny bug whose infestation is the deadliest epidemic to strike the forests of the Colorado Rockies since perhaps the gold rush.

Last fall, Eagle County, the Town of Vail and the U.S. Forest Service joined forces to remove thousands of trees killed by pine beetles in West Vail. Some of the dead fall was burned and other trees were taken away by helicopter to be used for biomass fuel.

The project created a fire line between the houses and forests in the area, as so many dead trees in any one area naturally pose a fire hazard.
The beetles mostly infest lodgepole pine trees, their presence evidenced at first by popcorn-shaped clumps pouring out of the bark, the wood of the tree stained blue and eventually by the drying and death of the tree. After one tree dies, the beetles move on to another. Hence, the entire hillsides covered by dead trees.

The only way to stop a beetle outbreak is a sustained freeze (subzero temperatures for many days), or a mass burn.

Eagle County and Forest Service officials plan to continue controlled burns and removal of dead trees from areas of the forest damaged by beetles.

On the bright side, even if all the lodgepole pine are killed by beetles in the next few years as experts predict they will be, nature scientists say that aspens will be the first trees to spring up during the re-growth. The entire landscape of this valley might be covered with aspens in 15 years. Only then we can hope the pine beetles will move along.