The mountain pine beetle epidemic is going to change the way Colorado looks for decades, if not longer. The Colorado Forest Service (not known for excitability in these matters) predicts that every mature lodgepole pine in the state will be dead within five years. If you’ve been in Rocky Mountain National Park, you know that lodgepoles are an iconoc part of the landscape.

I attended a talk by University of Colorado professor Jeffry Mitton, an expert on pine beetles. The auditorium at the Boulder Public Library was nearly full. He said that a square that is 1,000 miles on a side, stretching from Colorado to Alberta to British Columbia to Northern California, is under epidemic conditions; within this range, mountain pine beetles are devastating the lodgepole pine forests. “We’re taking more than 1 million square miles of beetle infestation,” he said. “This thing is huge.”

He added some insights to the situation that merit sharing. One, mountain pine beetles are endemic in the Rockies. They’ve been attacking pines for millions of years, he said. “They’re part of the forest ecology.” Two, while climate change is a factor, there are other reasons the pine beetles are so successful at killing off trees right now.

Mitton showed historical photos from the turn of the last century showing a much sparser looking lodgepole landscape. “Once these areas were settled, forest fires pretty much stopped,” he said. That led to thicker forests. The lodgepole pine’s natural defense against beetles is to “pitch them out,” Mitton said. The beetle bore holes into the bark and begin carving galleries in the phloem, the material between the bark and wood that is essentially the vascular system of the tree. Healthy trees kill or force out the beetles by flooding them with pine pitch. But with a denser forest, each tree gets less water, and is thus less capable of defending itself. Drought conditions and hot summers, combined with warmer winters that make life easier on the beetles, have led to this epidemic.

One small bright note: The beetles can’t thrive in trees smaller than 7 inches in diameter. Therefore, once this generation of lodgepoles is gone, the beetle population will crash, and the younger pines will get a chance to fill in behind their dead relatives. For more on how the tiny beetles kill such big trees, check out this link.

P.S., this particular brand of beetles won’t be coming to Minnesota, because we don’t have lodgepole pines. But ash borers and other pests are posing a similar menace to our forests.

As of last Friday, your humble Travel correspondent took leave from the Star Tribune to spend nine months at the University of Colorado-Boulder. I’m a fellow at the Center for Environmental Journalism, which is another way of saying after 22 years of working, I’m a student again.

Today is Freshman Move-in Day, so the streets are filled with moving trucks and concerned looking parents. I moved into a cabin at Chautauqua Park, on a hill overlooking the city. The cabin, and the whole Chautauqua complex, are National Historical Monuments, which means that for the first time in my life, I’m living in a tourist attraction. The Chautauqua was built in the 1890s as a place for mass education and entertainment; it was the internet of the day. Here, travelers came to hear great thinkers, musicians and to exercise in the clean mountain air. That’s exactly what they do today, too. (Last night at the Community Hall there was a discussion of “What exactly constitutes a sustainable diet?” And tonight, Bruce Hornsby is playing the Auditorium. ) Tourists walk across my yard, tourists stand and gape at me on my front porch, tourists talk on their cell phones much too loudly; Alice didn’t make it to the park because couldn’t find her way out of paper bag with a flashlight.

So there’s some poetic justice involved, since much of the last 22 years I’ve been a tourist in other people’s yards. I’ll continue to blog from the Rocky Mountain Bureau here on Gaillardia (not giardia) Lane, on the same eclectic mix of topics and, on my area of study here, which is mainly on how tourism helps and hurts the environment. As always, the floor is open for discussion.

 Above: Royal Arch in Boulder, Colo.       The Escape Artists have been dwelling on travel negatives lately (and it can’t be denied there are a lot of them these days). But the title of the blog implies that against long odds we can still find ways to get where we want to go. A case in point was this weekend’s trip to Boulder, Colo. My spouse and I are moving there in August for a nine-month sabbatical (me at CU in environmental journalism, she at some yogic institution of higher learning yet to be determined) and we wanted to scout the territory. The tickets to Denver on Frontier, procured four weeks ago, cost $250 each. The hotel, a Residence Inn, was about $145 a night. (All the cheaper digs were booked. As it turned out, this was the weekend of the Boulder Creek Festival and the Bolder Boulder 10K, in which 53,000 runners from across the globe descend on the town). The rental car for three days, a steal at $84 bucks (a rate snared through a new site: rentalcarmagic.com, which compares quotes and finds coupons. it’s offering trials fee at the moment).      We fell in love with the place.  The town is very walkable and bikeable, with designated paths crisscrossing the town, and lots of traffic calming measures (landscaping, raised crosswalks, turnabouts). To save money on food we shopped at the farmer’s market, which was incredible. Organic greens, tomatoes, fresh bread, homemade granola, cheese. There seems to be a Whole Foods or Wild Oats every three or four blocks, and we supplemented our cache there. And we went on some incredible hikes. The City of Boulder, with about 100,000 people, has 40,000 acres of open space, mostly along the Flatirons — the dramatic peaks that rise just west of town. The town ends abruptly at the parklands, and within minutes you can be in the wilderness (with a lot of other people, granted.)Our favorite hike was a 1,100 foot climb to Royal Arch, with a spectacular overview of what will be our new home. It was a four-day trip. The airfare was reasonable. Frontier’s service was polite, helpful and the planes were on time. The town was drunken with spring (and I get the feeling that Boulderites may always feel a little giddy, just being where they are). So, all in all, a successful escape. Anyone else have good news to share? I’m also welcoming any and all advice on food, hikes or other ins and outs of life in Boulder.    Below: The view of Boulder from Royal Arch. Â