A drive to Rocky Mountain National Park’s west entrance one recent afternoon feels eerily like a funeral procession. Along the roadside, most of the trees are horizontal. Through rain that hangs like a mist, each bend in the road reveals new piles of lodgepole pine trunks, stacked like casualties of war.
The park’s west side has been hit particularly hard by mountain pine beetles: Almost every large lodgepole stand is dying. Now those trees are literally falling down.
Snow is just clearing here after an exceptionally cold spring. Recent days of heavy winds and ground sodden with snowmelt are taking a final toll on shallow-rooted pines.
Although logic dictates dead trees will fall, the aftermath is still shocking to see.
Even in shades of red and brown, lodgepole pines with tall, slender trunks and thin, high crowns are an impressive vertical sight. Now the tree line is diagonal. In crowded lodgepole stands, there’s simply not room for each falling tree to make it to the ground. Instead, they lean on each other, injured soldiers trying to find a place of rest.
At their feet, the forest floor is littered with fallen comrades, once mighty centenarians scattered on the ground like broken twigs after a storm. It looks like a giant has stormed through here, knocking aside everything in its path, rather than a tiny rice-sized beetle.
Needles of infected trees turn yellow, red, then brown in two years. Now the trees are mostly gray. Like ghosts, they shade the road and forest, keeping silent vigil over their brethren.
It’s quiet this May afternoon, as though the entire forest is mourning. As we drive, tires hissing along rain-slicked roads, the only life we encounter is mechanical — a strange-looking vehicle called a Delimber. We watch its long arm swing into the forest, grabbing a fallen tree with its huge claw. The truck will strip the tree’s limbs before laying it to rest on the roadside.
Park officials are clearing trees 100 feet back from the 10-mile drive connecting the west entrance to Trail Ridge Road, which opened last week. Almost every trailhead and picnic area here will close some time this summer for hazardous tree removal.
Beetle-killed pines fall to the ground within five to 10 years, says a Forest Service report titled “Bark Beetle Outbreaks in Western North America.” The U.S. Forest Service says 100,000 trees a day will fall in Colorado and Wyoming over the next 10 years.
Even green trees are falling. Dense lodgepole stands provide protection for trees against strong winds. But with so many dead trees down, the few green trees left are susceptible to toppling.
Park officials are careful to explain the destruction we see is part of a natural cycle. Beetle infestations occurred here several times in the past 500 years.
Unfortunately, the current outbreak is the largest and most severe in recorded history, says the Forest Service report.
As the rain clears on our second day, we can see what we missed in our shock the previous afternoon: tiny new trees lining the road.
Along Coyote Valley Trail, prolific stands of young green trees surround the feet of rusty red giants.
Lodgepole pines are adapted to quickly regenerate after major disturbances like forest fires — or beetle outbreaks. Young pines love the sunshine created by open space and trees grow fast, almost a foot a year.
In fact, thanks partly to decades of fire suppression, most of Rocky Mountain National Park’s lodgepoles are actually near the end of their 150- to 200-year growth cycle.
“These are really old trees,” a park ranger tells us.
What the forest fires aren’t doing, the pine beetles are: regenerating an entire forest.
“Take pleasure in the new forest that is sprouting by exploring our trails and looking for seedlings that are taking hold,” the park’s newspaper says.
But first, I will take a moment to remember — and mourn — the trees that have fallen.
