A few years ago when we lived in Livermore, Colorado, up in the rocks 45 minutes northwest of Fort Collins, we were surrounded by lodgepole and ponderosa pines and Douglas Firs. To a flatlander from Florida it was very dramatic and beautiful, with valleys and hillsides covered in green year ‘round, straw underfoot. Fresh snow in the pines, Stellar’s Jays--the most amazing blues on those birds--herds of Mule Deer, a Mountain Lion at our back door, coyotes at night, a bear-chewed beer cooler and fishing the rivers in our drift boat, those memories of Colorado jump to mind.
I fished for trout in Walden, Colorado, a two hour oneway trip over what’s called the western ridge, smaller mountains leading down to Rocky Mountain National Park. You’ve gotta do some serious driving to find good fishing in Colorado.
Leaving our home I’d drive west a few minutes, then turn south along a winding dirt road that led down to the Poudre River. (There’s a long, boring story about how the river got its name--something to do with keeping gun powder dry--but it’s known more for the pronunciation of its name...”pooter.” You get used to it after a few years.) I seldom fished the river. It’s fast and treacherous, with few little public access, and you must mend your flyline constantly, which is a pain, involving short casts and a sweeping arm movement to reposition your fly so it doesn’t get caught in the current and look unattractive to the small rainbow trout that live there. Not a good river to fish, but as pretty as you’ll ever see, it winds southwest along Highway 14. In the early fall, with the Aspen trees changing, the rushing river shining, and herds of Bighorn Sheep along the ridges, it’s hard to focus on the road. Add a little snow and you’ve got your hands full.
Turn right forty-five minutes up river and you head over the mountains and down to Walden, Colorado, at a crossroads in flat ranch land with small willow-lined rivers all around.
Just as you approach the highest part of the mountain pass you begin to notice the the wall of green pines turning to brown. The first time I saw it, in 2007, I pulled my truck over and gazed in amazement. More than 90% of the trees, in dense stands as far as I could see, were D-E-A-D, still standing, with little dots of green--a few hardwoods and aspens interspersed. Whole mountainsides! Sad doesn’t cover it! It’s a disaster and it hasn’t caught fire YET. They’re standing there waiting for a lightning bolt. As the road descends it’s like entering some Hell Valley, a doomed land.
Over the next few years I drove as far north as Saratoga, Wyoming, and south to the ski areas west of Denver, looking for streams to fish. Millions of acres of standing dead trees! Driving over the Snowy Range west of Laramie, Wyoming, it’s shocking to see the devastation. In a few years it will be ugly, all bare rocks and struggling aspens.
I went for a job interview, to sell homes for a developer two hours west of Denver. He had a huge bulldozer and was proud of the dead pines he’d removed, acres and acres of ‘em, with the green ones remaining surely on borrowed time. He was very proud of the ones alive, seemingly wanting to name them individually. Prevention is limited to spraying, it’s no guarantee the trees won’t be attacked, and it costs around $15 per tree annually. Makes for strange brochure copy, and calls for a type of selling I’ve always avoided. You don’t read much about it, but ski areas with trails winding through the pines are infested and changing quickly from green to brown, from narrow runs through the greenery to an all-Buttermilk, snow-pasture look. Removal of the trees is immensely expensive.
You’d think that a company in the wood business somewhere would capture all that standing plywood. The Greeks and Chinese, to name just two countries, import their wood, and both have some big boats. Get after it, right!? A blue staining pattern develops in the beetle-killed trees’ interiors, but here in America we paint our wood anyway, and the blue color doesn’t affect its strength. There are mountains of wood pellets for stoves, countless cords of firewood free for the taking. (If I lived in a neighboring state I’d get me a big-ass-tree truck, one of those big metal yard fire rings and some old recliners, a wood-burning kitchen stove and a modern fireplace that circulates the heated air, and I’d cut my ‘lectricity bill by 90% come wintertime. How much wood can a immigrant chop? Hire me some and go to it! They’d do anything to get out of the stink of the meat processing plants in Greeley...but that’s another story.)
Driving home from Walden on an early trip, I stopped along the dirt road north of the Poudre, to check out trees that were circled by orange tape. I saw the problem, but didn’t know what it was until later when I got online. There were small, dime-size, crusty yellowish, popcorn-looking things like wood pustules scattered on the trees’ bark. They’d been marked for removal by the Forestry Service.
When I got home I mentioned what I’d seen to a tree-hugger friend, who said it was caused by all the salt on the road during the winter. (Ecofreaks in Boulder don’t even salt their food.) She said that the beetle damage was on the western slope, miles from there. Not to worry, according to her experts at Colorado State in Fort Collins, home of Liberal intellectual forestry management types by the dozen.
Three years later my friend paid big bucks to have sixteen mature, gorgeous pine trees removed due to beetle damage on their property a mile from our home, and there were dead trees in every direction. I was told that pines on our property of average height were over 200 years old, much younger than the towering Firs. It takes forever for things to grow out there.
Remember the fire in 2012 north and west of Fort Collins? It came to within 1/4 mile of our home, which we sold the year before the fire, though at a huge loss. There was zero “traffic”, very few buyers out looking for a home in the mountains. We got “lucky” and took a beating.
The real estate market for high-end homes was already dead, like everywhere else in the country. I thought that people with homes left for sale near where the fire had raged were screwed. I was wrong. Though the fire destroyed many homes, the demand increased dramatically for remaining properties missed by the fire. People who had lost their homes and collected fat insurance checks wanted to move back into the area, back among the green pines not yet hit by the beetles. Gamblers all! Go figure!
Here in south Florida flood insurance rates are increasing dramatically, hitting waterfront homeowners hard. Will homeowners living among the millions of acres of kindling out West see similar increases? Like the family home on the edge of a beach, the rest of us subsidize their insurance.
Once the next big fire starts it's hard to imagine ways to stop it. More ash than any series of volcanoes. Darkened skies. Cooling world temperatures. Do you and I subsidize their rates? Hell fire’s a’coming!
Once the next big fire starts it's hard to imagine ways to stop it. More ash than any series of volcanoes. Darkened skies. Cooling world temperatures. Do you and I subsidize their rates? Hell fire’s a’coming!
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