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NEDERLAND - While communities along Interstate 70 and Highway 40 in northwest Colorado deal with the bark beetle in full epidemic, a few people on the east side of the Continental Divide in Colorado are beginning to sound the alarm.
In Nederland, a town located about 30 miles west of Boulder, town officials have been talking about the arrival of bark beetles, reports the Mountain Ear. Some of Colorado's hardest-hit areas are allocated across the Continental Divide, in the Winter Park-Granby area.
Some trees have been killed by the beetles near the Eldora ski area, located near Nederland. Other beetle-killed trees have been noticed at the east end of the Moffat Tunnel, a railroad tunnel that flushes out at Winter Park.
The Colorado State Forest Service is urging aggressive efforts, both on private land and on public lands. Allen Owen, a state forester, says more clear-cutting and thinning 20 years ago would have prevented the problem now.
Christine Walsh, a ranger with the U.S. Forest Service, predicts the beetles will be in epidemic stage within two years.
Dead trees removed in Vail Valley project
VAIL - Chain saws and other cutting devices are at work in the forests along Interstate 70 in the Vail-Avon area. The Forest Service recently approved removal of lodgepole pine that have been killed or infested by bark beetles on 21 acres of land. Work is contemplated on 3,000 acres in what is called the Vail Valley Forest Health Project.
Silverton's X-rated ski area now sixth-biggest
SILVERTON - The largest testament to the enthusiasm for "backcountry light" skiing in the West is at Silverton Mountain. Now entering its seventh year, Silverton Mountain has more extreme skiing than any other ski area in North America.
Silverton also is now just a little bit larger, having purchased 164 acres of private land within its boundaries. Most of Silverton's land is controlled by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency. With this new land, Silverton now has 1,819 acres, or 14 more acres than Beaver Creek, which is also expanding this year.
This expansion also puts Silverton ahead of Telluride, making Silverton the sixth largest ski area in Colorado, if acreage is the criterion.
This will be the first season in which skiers will be allowed at Silverton without guides. The early season cost for an unlimited pass is $999.
Crested Butte says main street reserved for goods
CRESTED BUTTE - In an effort to preserve its struggling tourism base, Crested Butte has adopted zoning that tightly limits uses in its central shopping district. New service-type business such as barber shops and dance studios will not be allowed on the ground floors along Elk Avenue, the town's main street. Also banned will be new real estate offices.
Crested Butte is the third Colorado resort town to adopt exclusions, called horizontal zoning. Vail was first to take aim at ground-floor real estate offices, in 1973, followed by Aspen a year or two ago.
The move was driven by the town's need to get taxes from sales of goods. The sales tax in Colorado is the primary vehicle for local governments to provide services such as bus shuttles, bike paths, and snow plowing.
Crested Butte Mayor Alan Bernholtz insisted that the new zoning is not a 'Realtor witch-hunt," reports the Crested Butte News.
"We're not saying you can't be a Realtor in this town," he said. "Just remember, you can go to the second floor of a building and still sell real estate. It's a necessity we need and use. We're just trying to put them in the right spot."
Sean Hartigan, owner of The Last Steep, said customers have become increasingly vocal in their observations.
"People come in and say, 'What in the hell is going on in this town?' " said Hartigan. They often refer to the influx of real estate offices.
"We used to be a drinking town with a skiing problem. Now it's seems to be a real estate town with a drinking or skiing problem."
Linda Powers, a shop owner and former mayor, said that in losing its shopping opportunities, Crested Butte is losing its character. "We're losing our heart and soul."
But there was dissent, too. The Crested Butte News explains one thought is that the market itself will sort out the best uses of the property.
"The reason retailers aren't moving in is because they can't support themselves," said Judy McGill, one property owner on Elk Avenue. "There is a certain thing called market conditions. Right now real estate is the business of town. That will change. It will flatten out. Offices will close."
In a valley of dying trees, logs imported
EAGLE - Log buildings have been all the rage in the Eagle Valley for 10 years or more. and that is fitting. The valley - an area that extends from Vail Pass to Glenwood Canyon - is flanked by thick forests of lodgepole pine as well as spruce and fir.
The irony is that these logs early on came from Montana and Idaho and, more recently, Oregon and Washington.
Why not the local trees for these new Lincoln Log homes and lodges? Because the trees grow wider and taller in the Pacific Northwest, even in Montana's Bitterroot Valley. In Colorado's higher and drier climate, 40-foot logs are rare.
But not all builders buy into this line of thinking. The Eagle Valley Enterprise tells of a retired school principal who used pine trees killed by bark beetles to build his home. But because of the shorter, slimmer trees, a different construction technique, called post-and-beam construction, was used. The homebuilder and principal's son, Phil Gould, used the 10- and 20-foot lodgepole pine logs in a grid pattern. This post-and-beam method creates a log home where everything is supported by posts.
This style has an inherent advantage, in that there are no settling corners, a problem that can afflict even the $5 million homes at nearby Beaver Creek. Gould told the Enterprise that the bark-beetle killed trees, when allowed to stand while dead for a while, are also drier and won't shrink, creating the cracks and gaps found with trees that are cut while still alive.
That this house is unusual in the Eagle Valley is the greater story here. A bark beetle epidemic has been waxing now for 10 years, and the Forest Service estimates 720,000 acres of pine trees infested by bark beetles are found between Vail Pass and Avon, a town 20 miles east of Eagle. Current plans, if still somewhat unclear, call for trees to be removed from portions of 58,000 acres.
Tom Olden, one of the few loggers remaining in a valley that once had five or six sawmills, explains that old, beetle-killed trees from the Flat Tops, located to the northwest, were harvested for local homes until just a few years ago. But architects designing the expansive multi-million dollar houses are now specifying different types of logs. The logs they want have less taper than the smaller, local logs from Colorado, and instead come from the forests of big Douglas fir trees along the rainy coastal areas of Oregon and Washington. In most cases, the trees come from older-growth forests.
"Our logs have so much taper in them, it's hard to get a wood log that is longer than 30 feet," explains Olden. He explains that the first 16 feet of local logs are cut off, because of the taper, if used for homes.
But using this post-and-beam method of house construction, the shorter, more tapered logs can be used. There's less waste - and hence it's the better thing to do environmentally, Olden maintains.
The issue of how to use the local beetle-killed trees is a significant one in the Eagle Valley. Some forests overlooking Vail appear to be 75 percent or more dead as a result of the pine beetles. While some worry about the aesthetics of the dead trees, others have begun to fret about the potential for a conflagration.
Town and county officials have talked about creating a biomass plant, but appear to have made little progress. Colorado's only remaining major sawmill is at Montrose, some 210 miles away from Vail. Olden says the wood from the vast beetle-killed forests in British Columbia have driven down prices of wood in the United States. Meanwhile, the price of diesel fuel has spiked sharply higher. Those crossing lines of higher costs and lower prices imperils even that last sawmill, says Olden.
In Nederland, a town located about 30 miles west of Boulder, town officials have been talking about the arrival of bark beetles, reports the Mountain Ear. Some of Colorado's hardest-hit areas are allocated across the Continental Divide, in the Winter Park-Granby area.
Some trees have been killed by the beetles near the Eldora ski area, located near Nederland. Other beetle-killed trees have been noticed at the east end of the Moffat Tunnel, a railroad tunnel that flushes out at Winter Park.
The Colorado State Forest Service is urging aggressive efforts, both on private land and on public lands. Allen Owen, a state forester, says more clear-cutting and thinning 20 years ago would have prevented the problem now.
Christine Walsh, a ranger with the U.S. Forest Service, predicts the beetles will be in epidemic stage within two years.
Dead trees removed in Vail Valley project
VAIL - Chain saws and other cutting devices are at work in the forests along Interstate 70 in the Vail-Avon area. The Forest Service recently approved removal of lodgepole pine that have been killed or infested by bark beetles on 21 acres of land. Work is contemplated on 3,000 acres in what is called the Vail Valley Forest Health Project.
Silverton's X-rated ski area now sixth-biggest
SILVERTON - The largest testament to the enthusiasm for "backcountry light" skiing in the West is at Silverton Mountain. Now entering its seventh year, Silverton Mountain has more extreme skiing than any other ski area in North America.
Silverton also is now just a little bit larger, having purchased 164 acres of private land within its boundaries. Most of Silverton's land is controlled by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency. With this new land, Silverton now has 1,819 acres, or 14 more acres than Beaver Creek, which is also expanding this year.
This expansion also puts Silverton ahead of Telluride, making Silverton the sixth largest ski area in Colorado, if acreage is the criterion.
This will be the first season in which skiers will be allowed at Silverton without guides. The early season cost for an unlimited pass is $999.
Crested Butte says main street reserved for goods
CRESTED BUTTE - In an effort to preserve its struggling tourism base, Crested Butte has adopted zoning that tightly limits uses in its central shopping district. New service-type business such as barber shops and dance studios will not be allowed on the ground floors along Elk Avenue, the town's main street. Also banned will be new real estate offices.
Crested Butte is the third Colorado resort town to adopt exclusions, called horizontal zoning. Vail was first to take aim at ground-floor real estate offices, in 1973, followed by Aspen a year or two ago.
The move was driven by the town's need to get taxes from sales of goods. The sales tax in Colorado is the primary vehicle for local governments to provide services such as bus shuttles, bike paths, and snow plowing.
Crested Butte Mayor Alan Bernholtz insisted that the new zoning is not a 'Realtor witch-hunt," reports the Crested Butte News.
"We're not saying you can't be a Realtor in this town," he said. "Just remember, you can go to the second floor of a building and still sell real estate. It's a necessity we need and use. We're just trying to put them in the right spot."
Sean Hartigan, owner of The Last Steep, said customers have become increasingly vocal in their observations.
"People come in and say, 'What in the hell is going on in this town?' " said Hartigan. They often refer to the influx of real estate offices.
"We used to be a drinking town with a skiing problem. Now it's seems to be a real estate town with a drinking or skiing problem."
Linda Powers, a shop owner and former mayor, said that in losing its shopping opportunities, Crested Butte is losing its character. "We're losing our heart and soul."
But there was dissent, too. The Crested Butte News explains one thought is that the market itself will sort out the best uses of the property.
"The reason retailers aren't moving in is because they can't support themselves," said Judy McGill, one property owner on Elk Avenue. "There is a certain thing called market conditions. Right now real estate is the business of town. That will change. It will flatten out. Offices will close."
In a valley of dying trees, logs imported
EAGLE - Log buildings have been all the rage in the Eagle Valley for 10 years or more. and that is fitting. The valley - an area that extends from Vail Pass to Glenwood Canyon - is flanked by thick forests of lodgepole pine as well as spruce and fir.
The irony is that these logs early on came from Montana and Idaho and, more recently, Oregon and Washington.
Why not the local trees for these new Lincoln Log homes and lodges? Because the trees grow wider and taller in the Pacific Northwest, even in Montana's Bitterroot Valley. In Colorado's higher and drier climate, 40-foot logs are rare.
But not all builders buy into this line of thinking. The Eagle Valley Enterprise tells of a retired school principal who used pine trees killed by bark beetles to build his home. But because of the shorter, slimmer trees, a different construction technique, called post-and-beam construction, was used. The homebuilder and principal's son, Phil Gould, used the 10- and 20-foot lodgepole pine logs in a grid pattern. This post-and-beam method creates a log home where everything is supported by posts.
This style has an inherent advantage, in that there are no settling corners, a problem that can afflict even the $5 million homes at nearby Beaver Creek. Gould told the Enterprise that the bark-beetle killed trees, when allowed to stand while dead for a while, are also drier and won't shrink, creating the cracks and gaps found with trees that are cut while still alive.
That this house is unusual in the Eagle Valley is the greater story here. A bark beetle epidemic has been waxing now for 10 years, and the Forest Service estimates 720,000 acres of pine trees infested by bark beetles are found between Vail Pass and Avon, a town 20 miles east of Eagle. Current plans, if still somewhat unclear, call for trees to be removed from portions of 58,000 acres.
Tom Olden, one of the few loggers remaining in a valley that once had five or six sawmills, explains that old, beetle-killed trees from the Flat Tops, located to the northwest, were harvested for local homes until just a few years ago. But architects designing the expansive multi-million dollar houses are now specifying different types of logs. The logs they want have less taper than the smaller, local logs from Colorado, and instead come from the forests of big Douglas fir trees along the rainy coastal areas of Oregon and Washington. In most cases, the trees come from older-growth forests.
"Our logs have so much taper in them, it's hard to get a wood log that is longer than 30 feet," explains Olden. He explains that the first 16 feet of local logs are cut off, because of the taper, if used for homes.
But using this post-and-beam method of house construction, the shorter, more tapered logs can be used. There's less waste - and hence it's the better thing to do environmentally, Olden maintains.
The issue of how to use the local beetle-killed trees is a significant one in the Eagle Valley. Some forests overlooking Vail appear to be 75 percent or more dead as a result of the pine beetles. While some worry about the aesthetics of the dead trees, others have begun to fret about the potential for a conflagration.
Town and county officials have talked about creating a biomass plant, but appear to have made little progress. Colorado's only remaining major sawmill is at Montrose, some 210 miles away from Vail. Olden says the wood from the vast beetle-killed forests in British Columbia have driven down prices of wood in the United States. Meanwhile, the price of diesel fuel has spiked sharply higher. Those crossing lines of higher costs and lower prices imperils even that last sawmill, says Olden.
