Colorado’s beetle battle

More than 1,100 trees at Breckenridge (Colo.) GC were cut down and chipped after being infected by the mountain pine beetle. Photo courtesy of Tim Walsh

Peter Bronski

Driving west on Interstate 70 out of Denver, it’s hard to miss the scenes of relative death and devastation.

Take, for example, Summit County, the home of the ski resort town of Breckenridge. Everywhere you turn, it seems the region’s pine trees are brown and dead, or quickly on their way to that fate. If you drive over Berthoud Pass and descend into Winter Park and the Fraser Valley, the scene is even more sobering. Entire hillsides, entire mountains and entire forests are brown — vast expanses of uniformly dead lodgepole and ponderosa pine trees. But why?

The problem is the mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae). The rice-sized natives of the forests of western North America are on the attack, and although minor outbreaks can occur in natural cycles, the recent outbreak is bigger and worse than anyone can remember. By some estimates, every large, mature stand of lodgepole and ponderosa pine forests in Colorado and southern Wyoming will be dead in three to five years. Already, 1.5 million acres in Colorado alone have fallen prey since the first signs of an outbreak in 1996.

Trees weakened by age, by crowding in dense stands as a result of wildfire suppression policies, by a prolonged drought in Colorado — and, some say, by global climate change — have found their natural defenses to be too little, too late. The mountain pine beetle is on the march, and according to Colorado State University Extension is attacking irrespective of property lines. Wilderness areas, subdivisions and backyards are equally susceptible. So, too, are golf courses.

At the 27-hole Breckenridge Golf Club, superintendent Tim Walsh and his top assistant, Jim Byers, first noticed the effects of the beetle about five years ago. It started slowly but has consistently progressed over time, and last year, the two had to supervise the cutting down and chipping — one of the only viable options once a tree is infected and one required by the town of Breckenridge — of more than 1,100 trees on the golf course property.

If a silver lining is to be found, it’s that some greens now benefit from better exposure to sunlight and increased air movement, thanks to the lack of trees surrounding them. But at Grand Lake Golf Course in the Fraser Valley, that’s a small consolation. Surrounded by Grand Lake, Lake Granby, Rocky Mountain National Park, Arapaho National Forest and the Winter Park ski resort, the golf course is situated in an idyllic mountain paradise … with one exception: the mountain pine beetle.

To date, Grand Lake has lost an almost unfathomable 16,000 trees. “It’s devastating,” says superintendent Allen Brown, CGCS, an 18-year
GCSAA member. “We shed tears over it.” The course has improved views of the surrounding mountains, for sure, but those views are dominated by more stands of forest killed off by the beetle.

For now, superintendents are chopping down the dead trees, thinning their forests to promote healthy trees, and preventively spraying healthy pines to prevent infection. But that’s about all anyone can do for now. “We’re going to ride [the outbreak] out and see how long it lasts,” says Breckenridge’s Walsh, a 13-year member of GCSAA. “Then we’ll come up with a forest management plan for replanting and emerging from this situation.”

Peter Bronski is an award-winning writer from Colorado and a frequent contributor to GCM.