Across the Front Range, century-old, iconic ponderosa pines span thousands of acres — stretching from the rugged foothills and into the neighborhoods and backyards of local communities. But over the past three years, that landscape has noticeably shifted.
More hillsides are now marked by thinning crowns and shades of brown — signs of a growing pine beetle outbreak, according to the state’s Forest Service lead entomologist, Dan West.
“The ability for these small, little insects to work in concert to all attack one tree all at the same time and to overcome the tree’s defenses that have been there for a century is truly staggering,” West said. “And then on top of that, when you think about the breadth of which we're looking at, just as far as you can see, there's dead trees.”
It only took a few years for these tiny insects, no bigger than a grain of rice, to explode across the Front Range and impact more than 7,000 acres of forested land. Now, Gov. Jared Polis has launched an aggressive response.
In mid-December, Polis signed an executive order creating a statewide task force to coordinate mitigation efforts and a response plan to the growing outbreak. The task force was officially activated in late February.
But this isn’t the first time the state has confronted a major pine beetle outbreak — or created a task force to help stop it.
“We're no stranger to pine beetle infestation in Colorado,” Gov. Polis told CPR News. From the late 1990s through 2014, a pine beetle epidemic swept more than three million acres in the high country, killing thousands of trees. But the difference now is the outbreak is closer to population centers — affecting forested areas in Boulder, Larimer, Jefferson, and El Paso counties.
“It affects everything from areas people like to hike and bike, to ponderosa pines you might have in your own backyard,” Polis said. “And that's why this action plan is so critical to make sure homeowners know what they can do to defend their own trees… how can we act to reduce forest fire risk, erosion risk, and other dangers that pine beetles bring in their wake.”
But putting that plan into practice across thousands of acres — spanning neighborhoods, open space and federal land — won’t be straightforward, particularly as debates continue over how beetle outbreaks should be addressed.
A landscape under stress
West has served as Colorado’s state forest entomologist for more than a decade.
On any given day, he conducts aerial surveys, scanning Colorado’s forests from a plane and tracking the canopy’s patchwork of colors. On others, he hikes through the woods carrying a small pickaxe and a pair of tweezers.
On a recent field excursion to measure pine beetle damage, he walked through Roosevelt National Forest, outside Gold Hill.
“It's alarming, of course — that's probably a 100-110 year old tree,” said West while pointing at a tall ponderosa pine with dried-out brown needles. Large, sticky red globs dot the trunk — evidence of where bark beetles chewed through the bark and entered the tree.
Nearly every tree is covered in those same sticky globs.
What was once a thriving, lush forest is now a graveyard of dead or dying trees. But that isn’t the only unusual thing about this forest.
“Looking across the landscape normally where you'd see a sea of white, we're seeing a sea of brown,” said Paul Amundson, the state’s Division of Fire Prevention and Control Battalion Chief, who joined West on this pine beetle survey. It’s February, and the forest floor — usually blanketed in snow — is mostly bare. The pine trees are spindly, brown and dead.
Across the Mountain West, snowpack has dropped to historic lows, leaving soil and waterways unusually barren and dry. This “snow drought,” driven by record-breaking warm temperatures, is affecting more than just Colorado’s world-renowned ski resorts and winter recreation; it’s also putting added stress on forests, weakening trees and making them more vulnerable to pests like the pine beetle, with cascading effects across the ecosystem.
“Trees aren’t just sitting ducks,” West said. Normally, they can defend themselves against pests like pine beetles. But during extended periods of drought, trees aren’t able to produce enough resin — their number one defense mechanism against the beetles — to fight off pests.
“So what we see is these bark beetles gone wild when this happens — the beetles can overcome tree defenses relatively easily,” West said.
Together, prolonged drought and accelerating beetle activity are reshaping parts of the Front Range, raising concerns about wildfire risk, watershed protection and the long-term health of Colorado’s forests.
An aggressive multi-pronged approach
According to Gov. Polis, the state’s new task force will coordinate a response to the outbreak using existing resources at the State Forest Service that won’t “add new costs to the state budget.” The governor’s proposed budget sets aside $3.9 million for the task force, as well as tax incentives to encourage the removal and commercial use of beetle-killed timber.
The multi-agency task force includes over 30 leaders from the Department of Natural Resources, the Colorado State Forest Service and the Division of Fire Prevention and Control (with leaders and experts like Amundson and West among their ranks), along with representatives from utilities, local governments, tribes and federal land managers. Because of the scope of the outbreak, Gov. Polis said the collaborative effort across agencies is critical.
Another part of the plan taps Mother Nature for help. At the Colorado Department of Agriculture’s Palisade Insectary, researchers are turning to native predators — including a checkered beetle that feeds on bark beetles at both larval and adult stages — to help combat the pine beetle outbreak. On Friday, Polis’s office confirmed the allocation of more than $400,000 for those efforts.
Dan Bean, who directs the insectary, said the team is beginning to lab rear the checkered beetle, with plans to eventually release them in affected areas.
“We’re early in our efforts to control the pine beetle, so we don’t have results, even preliminary ones,” Bean told CPR News in a statement, calling the project part of the insectary’s broader, decades-long biological control work across Colorado.
Experts say the real threat is climate change
This is not the first time the state has taken an aggressive approach to a pine beetle outbreak. There were also major outbreaks in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and early 2000s, according to research by Tom Veblen, an ecologist and retired distinguished professor emeritus at CU Boulder.
Gov. Polis’s vigorous approach to the current outbreak has drawn criticism from forest ecologists, like Veblen, and environmental advocates, who say it will entail too much logging.
While Veblen agrees that the creation of a multi-agency task force is needed, he worries that alarm-driven public messaging could blur the line between wildfire mitigation and expanded timber production.
So far, details of Polis’s plan remain scant, but logging is one of the approaches outlined in his announcement of the task force, which includes tax incentives for logging.
Veblen pointed to his own research — arguing that such outbreaks are a natural part of the ecosystem, but said the current outbreak is directly linked to climate change.
“The underlying driving factor of both the increase in wildfire all across the Western U.S. … and the increase in periodic beetle outbreaks — is climate warming,” Veblen said. “I'm not trying to diminish the fact that we do have a wildfire risk problem, but it should not be blamed on bark beetle outbreaks.”
Still, Veblen said he worries there is a disconnect between the science on pine beetle outbreaks and the way they are being framed in policy discussions.
Despite conflicting research regarding the repercussions of pine beetle die-offs, what is uniformly agreed upon is that climate conditions and drought are the main drivers of fires, not beetle outbreaks.
Last year, President Trump signed an executive order calling for increased timber production nationwide, and another executive order on wildfire prevention that listed increased logging. These national priorities are concerning to Veblen.
“All the experts in the field agree that we cannot log our way out of the high fire risk that we're facing, but you're still getting politicians and others suggesting that we just need more logging in our national forests,” he told CPR News. Instead, Veblen believes state governments should put more effort towards retrofitting homes and communities to protect them against wildfires and other natural disasters, to adapt to increased fire risk.
Veblen said he suspects Polis’s aggressive response to the pine beetle outbreak was influenced by the national directive to increase logging.
However, a spokesperson for Gov. Polis’s office told CPR News that “the Governor’s executive order has no relation to any actions by the federal government.”
Whether the state’s new task force can slow the outbreak remains to be seen.
As experts debate logging, climate, and fire risk, one reality is already clear: Colorado’s forests are changing — and communities living among them will have to adapt to what comes next.
West said the changes are already visible.
“These forests have been here for millennia, and [people say] ‘I want to move to the Rocky Mountains because of the Rocky Mountains,’” he said. “But parts of that will be forever changed because of this mountain pine beetle.”
