Colorado’s tree-eating pine beetles are surging back after a prolonged dry spell

The terrifying beetle-kill headlines from the mid-2010s were as relentless and depressing as the swaths of rust-red dead lodgepole on your favorite drives or hikes in Grand County. Coloradans wondered if their beloved forests would ever recover from the onslaught of bark-boring pests, and if tourism would suffer a big bite. 

A decade later, there’s good news and bad news, according to the annual aerial survey of state trees from Colorado State University’s forestry department. 

The notorious spring rains and floods of 2013 slapped back one voracious, drought-opportunistic pest, the mountain pine beetle, according to CSU. And a relatively wet 2023 for much of the state bolstered many trees against the spread of that beetle, the separate spruce beetle and the spruce budworm. 

But a dry 2024 set the pests marching and eating again by sapping forests of the water they need to stay healthy and fight off infestations, said Dan West, entomologist with Colorado State Forest Service. Colorado’s higher-altitude forests need several normal to wet seasons in a row to build up true resiliency, he said. 

Read more from Michael Booth at ColoradoSun.com.

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