Pikes Peak Region Trail Finder

Beetles still sparing the Pikes Peak region

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Created on Tuesday, 25 January 2011 20:36

Written by R. Scott Rappold

(Huge swaths of Colorado's central and northern mountains have been devastated by mountain pine beetles since 1996.)

By R. SCOTT RAPPOLD, THE GAZETTE

Mountain pine beetles continued their march through the Rockies last year, infesting another 400,000 acres of forest in Colorado and Wyoming, but the latest aerial survey results show the outbreak has not reached the Pikes Peak region.

The beetles have attacked 4 million acres since 1996, including some of the state’s most-visited forests and largest ski areas. In Pike National Forest, last year saw new incursions into 24,000 acres of higher-elevation trees near Hoosier Pass and northern and western Park County, but the beetles have not made the jump into lower-elevation stands of ponderosa — yet.

Local observers are cautiously optimistic the region can avoid the devastation being wrought in northern Colorado.

“I think we can control it. But there’s that potential. We’re surrounded. We’re sort of an island,” said Jonathon Bruno, executive director of the Coalition for the Upper South Platte, a group that has removed beetle-killed trees. “We’re surrounded by pine beetle and it’s going to come in. The trick is going to be to identify it at the onset and try to take care of the treatment.”

Click here to see maps from the 2010 aerial surveys.

The beetles are native to Colorado, though drought and overgrowth have made the forests more susceptible to the outbreak.

Until recently, most of the devastation had been among lodgepole pines of the central mountains. But the 2010 survey, released Friday, showed tens of thousands of acres of ponderosa pines along the northern Front Range have also been invaded.

Bruno doesn’t know why the beetles have not moved into the ponderosa pine forests of the Pikes Peak region. After seeing some beetle activity along Ute Pass and around Woodland Park since 2000, the 2010 survey showed just a tiny amount of new beetle-kill.

Bruno credits the tree-thinning work his group and others have done on about 1,000 acres.

“Definitely, we still have areas where we’re seeing the pine beetle, but it’s under control to the extent it can be,” he said.

Prevention — removing dead trees from the national forests, encouraging landowners to do the same — is key, he said, because once an infestation has begun, it is difficult to stop.

Jeff Underhill, timber program manager for Pike National Forest, said the Pikes Peak region lacks the huge contiguous stretches of lodgepole pines that in northern Colorado proved to be such fertile beetle feeding ground. Where the beetle has spread over the Continental Divide near Fairplay and Leadville, the infestation is nowhere near the 95-percent tree mortality rate found elsewhere.

The agency will continue to thin up to 2,000 acres a year, mostly around Woodland Park. Officials aren’t ready to predict when the threat can be declared over.

Said Underhill, “If we don’t see a dramatic increase in the next 3 to 5 years and we have changing conditions, more moisture, more precipitation per year, we might get to a point where we don’t think the bugs are going to increase, but I think it’s premature right now.”