FOREST FARES WELL IN ROARING FORK VALLEY

The forest of the Roaring Fork Valley dodged the mountain pine beetle epidemic that turned much of Colorado’s mountain landscape brown, but it’s not out of the woods.

A comprehensive 2014 State of the Forest Report released Wednesday by Aspen Center for Environmental Studies takes a careful inventory of what infestations and diseases are threatening which species of trees in the valley.

“In the world environmental crises, no one’s talking about forests, until there’s a fire,” said Chris Lane, ACES executive director.

The Roaring Fork Valley forest is relatively healthy due to its diversity of tree species, the report says.

Resort areas such as Vail, Breckenridge and Winter Park had an overwhelming amount of lodgepole pine.

When the mountain pine beetle epidemic broke after drought weakened the trees’ defenses, their forests were hit hard.

In the Roaring Fork Valley, only 9.2 percent of the forest is lodgepole, and it is so dispersed that it wasn’t easily reachable by pine beetles, ACES report said.

About 29 percent of the forest is aspen trees and another 29 percent is chokeberry, serviceberry and sage. The remainder is 20.3 percent spruce, 7 percent piñon-juniper, and 5.6 percent cottonwood, Gambel oak and ponderosa.

“When broken down into land cover types, it’s clear that no single forest type dominates our watershed,” the report said.

That’s not to say the forest has gone unscathed. While the mountain pine beetle epidemic has weakened, there’s now a spruce beetle outbreak spreading.

“The threat of a spruce beetle outbreak is of significant concern to the Roaring Fork Watershed, where 20.3 percent of forest land cover is spruce-fir forest,” the report said.