FRISCO — Summit County’s Forest Health Task Force has long had the idea to bring blue-stained lodgepole pine products together in a catalog to market “Colorado blue pine” to architects, designers and builders.
While the idea has taken shape, a funding source for the project has not.
The task force estimates it will take about $40,000 in initial costs and two years of support before the catalog becomes self-sufficient.
With a goal of finding end uses for the millions of dead and dying trees in Colorado forests, Howard Hallman and the task force hatched the plan to create a catalog of locally and regionally manufactured products.
Hallman’s group has assembled a list of about 1,500 companies that use blue pine materials and a list of potential and current end-users.
The Colorado blue pine name comes from a fungal stain left behind when a mountain pine beetle burrows into the trunk to lay its larvae. It is followed by the fungus, which generally is what kills the tree.
Don Sather, owner of Big Horn Hardware, Design and Materials in Silverthorne, said he has seen an increase in interest in the blue-stained wood, even amid a construction decline in the past few years.
