Injections give trees a shot in bug war

Vail considering a plan to insert pine beetle repellent into healthy lodgepoles

The Rocky

Published March 1, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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Photo by Ken Papaleo / The Rocky

Trees afflicted with pine beetles border a meadow at Devil's Thumb Ranch near Fraser. Colorado lost 500,000 acres of lodgepole pines to the insect last year.

Photo by Chris Schneider / The Rocky

Andy Cadenhead, a forester with the U.S. Forest Service, points to a pine beetle larva with his knife.

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VAIL — Most experts agree the war against the mountain pine beetle in Colorado is all but lost, but Vail Resorts hopes to at least win a few battles against the voracious tree-eating bugs.

Vail Resorts has entered into discussions with Massachusetts-based Arborjet, which uses a new repellent injected into the trunks of healthy lodgepole pines to kill the rice-sized beetles.

Arborjet has an exclusive deal with the Swiss agricultural pharmaceutical firm Syngenta to distribute an internally administered repellent call emamectin benzoate.

The ski and real estate company hope to preserve stands of trees in critical areas of its four Colorado resorts - Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge and Keystone - that have aesthetic value for tourists and mountain real estate investors and also serve as windbreaks on the sides of ski trails.

"First of all, you cannot save the forest, but what you can do is you save individual trees and microcosm forests around homes, and you can save the basic blueprint of a ski area - clusters of trees that continue to add character to the resort," said Arborjet CEO Peter Wild.

Wild will meet with Vail Resorts officials today and will speak at a conference of lawn care professionals in Denver on Wednesday.

Colorado lost 500,000 acres of lodgepoles last year and 1.5 million acres overall since the mid- to-late '90s. The beetles burrow under the bark of older pine trees in dense, drought-stricken forests, laying eggs and carrying a fungus that ultimately kills the tree.

Spraying and thinning have proved ineffective in containing the outbreak, which is concentrated in the heart of Colorado's ski country - around Vail, Beaver Creek, Summit County, Steamboat and Winter Park.

Colorado resort operators hope to avoid the disaster that occurred in Brian Head, Utah, in the mid-1990s, when spruce beetles killed nearly all the trees on the upper half of the mountain, leaving it vulnerable to high winds and frequent lift closures.

But because most ski areas in the state operate on leased public lands, resorts must apply for timber sale permits and pay the federal government to remove dead trees and promote regeneration of the forest. Exceptions are made when dead trees threaten lifts or buildings.

"It's a very sensitive issue because (ski areas) lease land from the feds, and it's a very unique relationship that they have," Wild said. "It's going to be interesting to see how many trees on federal or state land end up being treated as compared to private lands."

Arborjet estimates that it will cost $20 to treat each tree, a job Wild said will need to be done every two or three years for the next 10 years.

Arborjet's product is still awaiting approval by the Environmental Protection Agency, which Wild hopes will happen by June, allowing treatment of healthy trees to begin by the fall.

Reservoirs are drilled into the tree's trunk, and the chemical is then injected and distributed throughout the tree through its resin. Wild says it's safe and does not enter the water table or affect wildlife.

"It is cheaper to save a tree than to cut it down," Wild said.

Bill Jensen, former president of the Vail Resorts' mountain division, estimated it costs $100 to cut down just one tree, of which 30 percent to 40 percent goes to the Forest Service.

His former company spent $200,000 cutting down 2,000 trees at Vail alone the past few years.

"In the case of Vail, both the mountain and the community have taken the steps and will continue to take the steps to protect the assets," said Jensen, who this summer will take over as CEO of Intrawest, which owns Steamboat and Copper Mountain and manages Winter Park.

Jensen, who will continue to own a home in Vail, has never been a big fan of the chain saw solution, saying some cutting needs to be done to promote regeneration but that pockets of trees need to be preserved for their visual value and to protect snowpack for skiers.

"I'm hopeful that this scientific solution may be the thing that a resort or a private property can turn to," said Jensen, who unsuccessfully lobbied the federal government to waive timber sales in beetle-stricken resort areas.

Ken Kowynia, winter sports program manager for the Rocky Mountain Region of the U.S. Forest Service, said spraying or injecting trees just buys time.

"We're beyond trying to stop (the infestation)," said Kowynia, who acknowledges the benefit of trying to preserve some "high-value" trees for visual screening or to protect a certain lift or trail from wind scouring.

"But the other part of the effort will be planning for the next generation of trees, and in order to do that you have to do some sort of tree removal," he said. "The basic objective of that is twofold: one, so we can provide for the next generation of trees, and also for aesthetics and fire protection."

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