Residents of Mancos feel the pain of trees' death

As aspen die, some worry about views, tourism, livelihoods

James B. Meadow, Rocky Mountain News

Monday, September 11, 2006

MANCOS - In the pearl-gray light of a gloomy afternoon, pummeled by hail and washed by rain, small armies of ghosts haunt the mountainsides. They make no noise, no music, but there is still something plaintive about their silence, about the way their leafless branches reach to the sky like the outstretched fingers of beggars.

These aspen trees are dead, standing like tall tombs over what lives beneath them on the forest floor. And although all around them, woven like a thick green carpet that is about to turn golden, vast currents of lush, healthy aspen still race across the mountains, it is the spindly silhouettes of the dying and the dead that seem to hold sway.

Down below, in spunky little Mancos, which U.S. 160 skirts, making it half-town, half-secret, people are noticing what's happening and they hate it. They hate it as much as they love their town, a town that's so "safe and sweet and quiet, I haven't locked a door in 25 years," Gail Bertram says.

In a town that's so everybody-knows-everybody, Bertram still doesn't know the names of the streets - all but two of which are unpaved.

"When I give directions, I just say, 'You go to so and so's house and then you turn off at so and so's house.' "

There are about 1,000 people in Mancos (which locals call "Mancus - as in spankus," Bertram says). There are an additional 3,000 in the Mancos Valley, and most don't share blood with the ranching families that settled the valley generations before Mancos was founded in 1894.

The drought and modern economics persuaded the ranchers to sell their land. Now, subdivisions are springing up along the valley, and a lot of the people who live in them - those who commute to Durango for work, retirees, snowbirds - don't quite embrace the close-knit, small-town ways that made Mancos a little slice of heaven for so many.

But no matter how long they've lived here, a lot of people look up at the gray swaths on the mountains and feel like town librarian Kate Kearns. Which is to say, "unsettled." The aspen are starting to die in larger, unexplained numbers, almost 9 percent by one estimate. To some, it feels eerily like what happened four years ago when the piñon started dying. Poof! Within two years, half of them were gone from the valley.

Lester Goff, who's lived in Mancos for 76 of his 84 years, feels something is wrong.

"Am I scared? I sure am. The last time I was up in the woods, big bunches of 'em was dying off."

He pauses. A lifetime of hiking, hunting, prospecting and working up among the trees fills that pause.

"The quakies - that's what I call 'em - are what made this area. They opened up the match factory for 'em. They made lots of work for lots of people. When I was a kid, we had lots of sawmills in this country. I sure am worried. I never seen them dying off this bad."

But not everybody is trembling.

Jack Ott, a retired forester who's lived in Mancos for nearly 50 years with his wife, Mary Ann, stands in his backyard and looks up toward Helmet Peak. He sees the swatches of dead trees sewn across the ridges, but still says, "For the most part, the aspen are in pretty good shape; I don't think it's real alarming."

Everybody hopes he's right; everybody hopes this spreading mortality is just part of the circle of life, death and regeneration that's been going on since forever.

Still, something doesn't feel right.

"It's not that they're dying; it's the rate they're dying," says Kearns, who in addition to working at the library teaches a course in environmental ethics at San Juan College. "What's happening here just doesn't feel natural."

She might be right.

'Real concerned'

Along the corridors of the Mancos Valley - home to the thickest concentration of aspen in the state - experts not given to hysteria or hyperbole have seen some potentially ominous signs.

"The mortality is synchronized; it's kind of occurring all at once," says Jim Worrall, a pathologist with the U.S. Forest Service. "And the second problem, even more serious, is we're concerned that the root systems of the clones (stands connected by a root system) are dying, too, so that the clones might not regenerate on their own in many cases.

"Normally, when stems die in an aspen stand, if they're not being replaced by conifers, aspen will often come back," Worrall adds. "The concern here is we may be losing some of these clones. That would be different than the normal death-and-replacement scenario."

Worrall, cautious and scientific, won't speculate on the severity of the problem. However, he knows that it's "pretty unusual for a whole stand to go out in just three or four years." He also knows, "It is safe to say we're going to lose some aspen acreage rather suddenly."

This potential loss occupies the thoughts of Norm Birtcher, who has worked in the area for 28 years. If he "isn't alarmed yet," then Birtcher is at least "real concerned."

His Western Excelsior Co. is the second-largest private employer in Montezuma County; the plant in Mancos employs 150 people year-round to assist in the harvesting of some 10 million board-feet of aspen annually that are used in erosion-control products.

Right now, Birtcher isn't worried.

"It looks to me like only 10 to 15 percent of the stands in our area seem to be experiencing some mortality."

What does detonate concern is, "We're harvesting some stands on private land that I looked at 18 months ago and they looked fine then; there was no evidence of mortality whatsoever. Now, you're seeing a large part of those stands dying. I've never seen it move that quickly in aspen in my career."

Birtcher adds that in the short term, the dying aspen are good news for Western Excelsior.

"It's allowed us to increase our supply by harvesting these dead and dying stands.

List of questions

"But long term?" he says, a thin whoosh of air escaping his lips. "Sure, I'm worried. If it continues to progress like it has in the last year, who knows? Long term, it would be difficult for me to source enough raw material to feed this plant."

If the aspen stop thriving, will the La Plata Mountains be as glorious? Will the San Isabel National Forest be as beautiful? Will the tourists come in the same numbers they always have in the fall, to ride along the San Juan Skyway - "the color loop" - and watch the aspen explode from green to gold and red?

And how will the locals feel if whatever is killing the trees inflicts lasting damage? If those great leafy canopies don't reclaim the land?

"What would Mancos be without the aspen? Come on," says 15-year resident Clara Martinez.

Herman Wagner doesn't want to know. He's 91 years old and has lived virtually his entire life in Mancos because, "Why would I want to live anywhere else? It's one of the most beautiful places in the state."

Wagner used to work for the Diamond Match Co., which became the Ohio Match Co. He recalls the logging, harvesting the aspen that were turned into a blizzard of matchsticks; aspen so plentiful, they were "thick as dog hair."

So lush were the aspen, a Chinese company contacted the Forest Service around 1970 about the possibilities of harvesting the trees to make chopsticks. Ott remembers that things looked good for a deal until he found out they wanted "all the aspen for 100 miles around.

"We had a lot of trees, but not that many," he laughs.

Now there are fewer trees and the potential for even more loss. And although no one can say for sure what is causing the dieback, most everyone figures it started with the recent, terrible droughts and now involves the subsequent invasion of predatory organisms.

Or, as Bertram says in a burst of frustration, "The trees got hit hard by the drought, they put out the stress vibe, and here comes every little cootie in the world."

Now, to see the aspen, denuded and dying, is "just gut-wrenching."

A treat for the senses

"You know what my favorite smell on Earth is?" asks Bill Baikie, 46, a carpenter, a hunter, a fisherman and a father. "Rotting aspen leaves. You know, when they've fallen off the trees and are on the ground and it's just rained."

"When it's misty and everything is quiet and you're up in the mountains, man, that humus smell is just incredible. I love it."

For some it's the smell, for others the sound.

"There's nothing like hearing the wind blowing through the aspen," Mary Ann Ott says. "It's like they're sighing. Sometimes, it sounds like they're whispering to each other."

For others, it's the sight.

"It's great to be up in the mountains when the quakies are turning," Goff says. "Most of 'em are yellow and orange, but sometimes when the frost hits 'em just right, they turn red. There's nothing like it."

Which is why Goff, why many people, are looking up at the surrounding peaks and feeling uneasy. Within weeks, the aspen will flare from green to gold.

The tourists will come and join with the locals to marvel at nature's incandescent rite of passage. But what about next year? And the year after that?

The piñons died, but they came back. Will the aspen do the same? That's a question that haunts some people, just as small armies of silent ghosts haunt the mountainsides above Mancos in the pearl-gray light of a gloomy afternoon.

meadowj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2606