GRANBY, COLO. — The pine trees cradling this mountain town are dying, turned rusty red by a beetle that is destroying the Rockies' forests.
The brittle corpses are an eyesore as well as a major fire hazard. When they collapse, they make hillsides unstable, increasing erosion and damming streams that feed into the Colorado River, which provides drinking water to seven states and Mexico.
But Randy Piper is trying to focus on the positive.
He moved here four years ago, scanned the hillsides and saw opportunity. Now he has a small showroom displaying beetle-killed pine logs that have been sculpted into doors, moldings or pieces for log cabins.
Piper emphasized the light blue streaks that run down the tawny wood, markers left by the parasites. "We're calling it blue pine," he said. "Sounds a lot sexier than beetle-kill."
As lodgepole pines by the millions topple in the West, a crop of entrepreneurs is sprouting to figure out what to do with their remains. The bark-beetle plague has injected new life into struggling sawmills and timber towns. People like Piper are selling the wood as a designer material. Others are transforming the downed trees into fuel pellets that can heat buildings.
"It brings a tear to your eye if you've grown up here or live here," Mark Mathis, chief executive officer of Confluence Energy in Kremmling, which is building a fuel-pellet mill, said of the beetles' destruction. "But at least we're trying to do something constructive."
Tiny bark beetles used to inhabit the few forests above 10,500 feet in elevation, but in recent years they have been venturing lower.
Although beetle-killed trees helped feed fires in Southern California over the last several years, the infestation is strongest in the interior West. In Colorado last year, 650,000 acres of national forest were infected, compared with 250,000 in 2005.
One reason the insects seem to be thriving is global warming. Many of the larvae that beetles deposit in trees used to die during the depths of winter, but milder temperatures have allowed them to stay in forests year-round.
"We can't stop the bark beetles, but we can do a lot to mitigate the impact, and part of that is producing goods for society's benefit," said Clint Khyle, the National Forest Service official in charge of fighting the epidemic in northern Colorado and southern Wyoming. "It's one of the bright spots of the epidemic. There's some real excitement in those small communities."
