Colorado mountain pine beetle task force getting to work as another outbreak looms

Members of Colorado's task force on the Front Range pine beetle infestation met at Chief Hosa Lodge on Wednesday morning amid worries about the expected wide-ranging damage that hangs over hundreds of thousands of acres of Colorado forests.

"This is a wicked problem," said John Sanderson, director of the Center for Collaborative Conservation.

He outlined some of the goals for local and state leaders: "Who's going to do what by when?"

Colorado has about 4.2 million acres of pine forest. Approximately 3.4 million acres were affected by the last pine beetle outbreak, which began in the 1990s and faded in 2013. That was primarily in lodgepole pine.

There are 800,000 acres along the Front Range at risk this time, said the Colorado Forest Service's state entomologist, Dan West. And this time, the pine beetle is showing up in ponderosa pine.

"If you were along the Front Range in 2013, we had the 100-year rain event, or the huge rain event, along the Front Range. And that kind of stopped the beetle in its tracks and allowed these trees to be able to draw up enough resources and start to defend themselves," said West.

That's not the case this time, he explained. Climate change has led to warmer temperatures, and Colorado experienced a warm, dry winter.

"Given the alignment with the precipitation, temperature, everything we're sitting at right now, we will for sure see an increase in intensity and the footprint of the mountain pine beetle moving forward," he explained.

While the acreage at risk may seem smaller, there is potential for very costly damage from the current outbreak. Forests along the Front Range have faced firefighting efforts for 100 years or more, but the affected area may be at greater risk, experts say.

"We've got property, life, egress, all the utilities, everything we've got along the Front Range that we've been protecting. But most of the ponderosa pine in these lower elevation forests are really at-risk because they've been there with not much disturbance, and of course, the lack of fire, which creates the mosaic of species and age diversity. And so what we've really seen is this kind of ever-increasing larger fuel load and or trees that are along the Front Range, so that's in large part why I'm more worried about this one than I was in the past," said West.

"There's a couple real bad infestations, one along I-70. There's more in Pine and Conifer and a little bit in between," explained Brad Huddleston, owner and certified arborist with Splintered Forest Tree Service of Evergreen. On Wednesday, they were working to protect trees in the Ruby Ranch area.

Injecting pesticide into trees helps it uptake into the tree's vascular system, which can save some trees and protect them longer than an external application, Huddleston explained. He pointed out a goopy pitch on the tree's exterior as evidence of an attempted invasion. When a tree is stronger, he says it will be better able to resist the infestation. A tree with only a few visible pitch tubes still has a chance to survive.

"That's what the grant program is trying to address, is trying to get the currently infested trees," he explained.

That program in Jefferson County is the Mountain Pine Beetle Landowner Assistance Program. It started only a month ago, with $500,000 set aside for homeowners who contract work to fight the pine beetle. Homeowners can apply for reimbursement of 50% of the cost of contracted mitigation services, with priority going to properties of less than 40 acres.

After one month, the program is already planning to pay out $183,000 of that money after receiving 47 applications.

Evergreen resident Scott Porter has been doing work himself after pine beetles wiped out dozens of trees on his property.

"We started having trees die this summer," he said. "When a tree died, we'd cut it down, and we probably felled close to about 70 trees."

He bought pheromone packs and a tree injection system for pesticides.

"We have ten acres, and I've probably treated over a hundred trees that have not yet been killed by the beetles," said Porter.

There could be some rough years ahead.  Porter said he hopes he's winning the battle.