Slipstream

I pass through Steamboat Springs and follow US 40 as it rises over Yampa Valley toward Rabbit Ears Pass. The sun sits low over the western mountains and casts a golden aura across the valley floor, turning the meadows into a vast carpet of iridescent green.

From up here, I can see how the river’s silver-blue waters meander through the valley, glistening in the day’s last light as it winds through the lush foliage. And ahead of me, off in the distance, the peaks blaze with the alpenglow’s orange radiance, set against the deep blue of a darkening sky.

This is the Colorado I remember, the Colorado I return to. Everything that surrounds me exudes the astounding beauty of the place I once called home. Even the forests seem charged, glimmering with a vibrant golden-orange glow that seems to emanate from the trees themselves.

Wait, that’s not what’s going on. Those are dead trees, thousands of acres worth. The aftermath of a mountain pine beetle infestation that has attacked the Rockies with a vengeance, taking out most of the lodge pole pine and leaving in its wake wide bands of forest that first turn rusty orange and then a deadly gray.

What I’m seeing is the rusty phase.

Pine beetle infestations are not unusual in the Rockies. They’re part of the natural cycle of forest regeneration. What is unusual is the extent of the infestation. Not only are we seeing unprecedented numbers of infected trees, but the beetles are reaching into higher elevations and higher latitudes, and are now jumping to new species.

And therein lies the problem. The millions of dead trees that surround me are only the tip of the pine beetle iceberg.

To date, the beetle has affected nearly 3 million acres of Colorado forests. The staggering amounts of dead wood could impact water supplies, change wildlife habitat, increase fire risk, curtail recreational actives, affect the timber industry, and pose a safety hazard to anyone in proximity of the dead trees.

In addition, scientists are now reporting the presence of beetles in the whitebark pine, once considered to live at elevations too high to be susceptible to beetle epidemics. And foresters in British Columbia are seeing outbreaks that are heading further north than ever before and taking in their wake an unprecedented number of trees.

It gets worse. The insects have jumped the Continental Divide in Canada and are now spreading northeast into the edges of the boreal forest, making it possible for the beetles to make their way west toward Alaska and east toward the Atlantic.

So what’s causing all the bugs to go so buggy? Several reasons have been cited—drought, warmer temperatures, and poor forest mismanagement. When you get too many of the same type of trees reaching the same age at the same time and then the planet starts heating up and the rain and snow stop falling, you have a recipe for disaster—and that’s exactly what’s happened here.

Forest management practices such as clear-cutting, mono-species planting, and fire suppression do not make for healthy forests. But they make for forests that the beetles like to call home. So too does a changing climate, when those changes increase temperatures and decrease the level of precipitation.

Although the causes of climate change are still being debated—at least in the US, the rest of the world seems to have caught on—what doesn’t change is the fact that so many trees are dead and dying. Even if the devastation were not so extensive, some level of destruction would still exist. Hordes of lodgepole pine have been wiped out in the past, and they’ll be wiped out in the future. That’s how nature works.

So this shimmering rusty wall that now surrounds me, washed in the golden glow of a late evening sun, might be here regardless of management practices and a changing climate. The forests cannot escape their cycles of death and regeneration any more than we can, no matter how hard we try.

Besides, if I were interested in correlating all the points necessary to draw such a conclusion, I would suggest that it has been our attempts to avoid facing death—and the industrial aftermath that is the consequence of such avoidance—that has led to the extreme environmental challenges we face today, the extensive pine beetle outbreaks being only one of them. But that’s a discussion best left to the experts. As I said, we’d still have acres of dead trees, just not so many.

So the Colorado I return to is not the Colorado I left 20 years ago. But then, I’m not the same person I was 20 years ago. Who is?

Yet when I drive over Rabbit Ears Pass and drop into Grand County—ground zero of the beetle epidemic—there’s still a part of me that has the sense I’m coming home, that the core of my past experiences remains untouched, despite the dying forests and the environmental changes they herald.

In fact, as I travel along the highway, wanting to reach my destination before dark, the changes I’m most aware of are not the endangered forests, but the way the shadows lengthen as I head east, reminding me of nightfall’s inevitable descent.

But then, even if I were to stand still, those shadows would still be growing longer.

 

Tags: Colorado, Grand County, mountain pine beetle, Rocky Mountains