Photo by Chris Welsch

Rust colored lodgepoles, doomed by pine beetles, ring a meadow on the Green Mountain Trail loop in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park is known for its spectacular alpine highway, Trail Ridge Road, which rises to more than 12,000 feet above sea level as it crosses the tundra, high above the treeline. That treeline is in big trouble. I went to the park on Saturday — it’s less than an hour away from Boulder — to take a long hike in the western part of the park. As I drove through the eastern side of the park, I caught glimpses of the mature lodgepole pine forests that are characteristic on the slopes of the park’s dramatic mountains. Symmetrical and tightly ranked, the trees form a geometric pattern of deep green that pleases the eye. On the western side of the park, the same kind of pattern could be seen but in a deep shade of rust. The pine beetle epidemic is deforesting the park with amazing speed. Whole mountainsides are red with dying pines. As of 2007, 1.5 million acres of Colorado’s pine forests were lost to the epidemic. Experts say that in 5 years, most of the lodgepoles in the state will be gone. Warmer winters have allowed the beetles to migrate north. There’s no effective or affordable way to stop them. This is a dramatic example of how the landscapes we love are being dramatically altered by climate change. It’ll be interesting to see how the mountain eco-system regenerates in coming years. Like the blowdown in the BWCA (but on a much larger scale), the repercussions (fires, erosion, etc.) will be coming for years.