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Henry Hornberger, general manager of Brian Head ski area in southwestern Utah, knows better than anyone else in the ski industry that “there is life after the beetle.”

Hornberger started as GM of Brian Head in 1996, just as the U.S. Forest Service had fought off the last of a series of challenges from environmental groups and begun aggressively cutting down dead and dying spruce trees impacted by a spruce bark beetle infestation beginning in the early 1990s.

At that point, it was far too late to prevent the damage. The upper 40 percent of Brian Head is on federal land, and years of drought and fire suppression made the resort’s spruce trees a veritable smorgasbord for the voracious insects. Near 100 percent mortality led to the removal through timber sales of virtually all the mature spruce trees on the upper half of the mountain.

Then, the remnants of a hurricane steaming out of the Gulf of California blew down many of the shallow-rooted fir trees that were unaffected by the beetle, but were no longer protected from the wind by the spruce trees. Suddenly, Brian Head was bald and in dire need of some re-vegetative Rogaine.

Brian Head became the poster child for what can happen to a ski area in the crosshairs of a bark-beetle infestation. But it’s also heartening to know that Brian Head survived and is coping with a catastrophic but inevitable natural process. Many resorts around the Rocky Mountain West are currently in the same position Brian Head was in a decade ago, losing lodgepole pines at an alarming rate—in this case to the mountain pine beetle—and wondering what to do in the wake of a changing landscape that will radically alter the way their mountains ski and the public perceives the scenery.

“Where it really has affected us is with wind. We have more incidents of having to shut the lifts down than we ever had to,” says Hornberger. (Installing heavier chairs can help to some degree.) The other problem with wind-scouring is keeping snow on certain areas of certain trails, a situation that can be partially dealt with by energetic grooming and installing snow fences.

Hornberger is buoyed by the knowledge that time heals all, and that trees are a renewable resource. He notes that spruce saplings planted as part of aggressive Forest Service re-vegetation efforts are doing well despite the ongoing drought.

“The silver lining is that our skiable acreage increased slightly, but the real downside was visual. Initially, people who had been coming here for years took one look and said, ‘Oh my God, what happened here?’ But that impact has diminished over time,” says Hornberger.

“From a marketing standpoint, the only thing we really pushed was that we have cleared a lot of dead trees and there’s a lot more open terrain,” Hornberger says. “Other than that we didn’t go out and talk about it too much.”

And, he concludes, a lot of skiers like wide-open terrain, à la Vail’s Back Bowls or the Big Burn at Snowmass, both created by big fires decades earlier that could have been fueled by beetle outbreaks.


An Exercise in Futility?
Bill Jensen, the new CEO of Intrawest, dealt with the bug outbreak for the better part of a decade as the COO of Vail Mountain and president of Vail Resorts’ mountain division. The same beetle is wreaking even more havoc in his new home of British Columbia, where mountain pine beetles have killed more than a billion lodgepole pines, covering an area estimated to be larger than Iceland.

Vail’s situation is in many ways typical of several Colorado resorts. The heavily forested front side of Vail Mountain is well on its way to losing more than 90 percent of its mature lodgepole pines as part of a mountain pine beetle outbreak in Colorado that ravaged 500,000 acres of lodgepoles in 2007, and 1.5 million acres overall since the mid to late ’90s—including many around Winter Park, Steamboat and the resorts of Summit County.

There will not be a repeat of the level of devastation wrought by the 1879 fire that created Vail’s legendary Back Bowls, Jensen says, because Vail has removed virtually all of the ground fuels on the front side of the mountain and keeps at the ready 800 to 900 snowmaking hydrants, a full reservoir and vehicles to transport hoses in the event of a wildfire.

He also notes that only about 25 percent of the trees on Vail’s front side are lodgepole pine, intermixed with 25 percent aspen and 50 percent spruce. But he concedes that losing even a quarter of the trees presents difficulties in terms of public safety, property values and aesthetics for both tourists and residents.

The reddish hue of the dead and dying trees has been causing concern for several years, to the point that Vail addressed the issue on its trail maps for the 2007-08 ski season. The resort has removed about 2,000 trees over the past two years, many under a special Forest Service exemption allowing for the limited cutting of dead trees that endanger chairlifts, structures or trails, but anything more extensive would require a costly timber sale. Jensen estimates it costs about $100 per tree to remove beetle-killed lodgepoles, of which 30 to 40 percent goes to the federal government—even when timber loses its value because it’s been dead too long.

Jensen traveled to Washington, D.C. to lobby federal officials for broader exemptions allowing for more clearing on land leased by ski areas without such steep compensation, but to no avail thus far. Some environmentalists don’t favor such a waiver, arguing such a move would open up national forests to much more aggressive logging practices. “It’s always a slippery slope if you open the door to changes like that,” says Ryan Bidwell, executive director of Colorado Wild. “In general, we’re not in favor of changing the rules to try to address the problem.”

But Bidwell does agree with aggressively removing trees in and around the base of resorts and ski towns: “We’re supportive of harvesting trees around homes and power lines and other community infrastructure to try to protect them from fire, and we’re also supportive of ski areas doing what they can to try keep remaining lodgepoles alive through spraying or other strategies.”

Jensen says it’s much easier for local governments to forge deals with the Forest Service to create defensible buffers in ski towns in the event of massive wildfires than it is for the resorts themselves. The town of Vail, Eagle County and the Forest Service contracted a helicopter logging service to pull about 6,500 dead trees out of West Vail last fall, then haul them off to be converted into premium wood pellets to heat homes.


Practical Steps
Still, such efforts are a drop in the bucket compared to the overall devastation, and some Vail-area residents would like to see a much more aggressive approach from the ski company to promote forest health and improve the ski terrain. “I would love to go into there and thin out the whole front side of Vail Mountain,” says Tom Olden, an Eagle-based logger and an avid skier. But Jensen says that strategy can only be taken so far. “The reality is you’re not going to convert the entire ski area to gladed skiing, and at some point you want to keep some wind protection between the runs.”

Selective thinning is just one arrow in the quiver. “Different resorts are experimenting with different things, but ultimately the pine beetle is going to rule the American West,” Jensen says, adding that it’s possible “necessity will drive a solution, and I tend to think the solution will be more scientific than chainsaw-driven.” Jensen foresees a chemical solution that will help resorts and property owners save “critical assets,” such as tree stands that provide wind breaks, visual value or lower the risk of wildfire.

Arborjet, a Massachusetts company, hopes to distribute a pesticide called Treeage, a chemical that is injected directly into healthy lodgepole pines. The product is still awaiting EPA approval, but company officials are hoping to get the nod this summer in time for the fall of 2008. Arborjet CEO Peter Wild says per-tree treatment time is just a few minutes. A crew of seven to nine people could treat 10,000 trees in two to three weeks, and protect the trees from beetle infestation for two or three years. After a decade, or roughly three or four treatments, the pressures on the population will have subsided and the bugs will have moved on.

If Treeage proves safe and effective, even the state’s environmental community would support it as one of the tools employed in the beetle battle. “To the extent that the EPA determines that it’s a safe option, then it’s certainly something we should consider for places like ski areas,” says Bidwell. “But I think it’s important not to look at this as a solution to the problem, but more as a way to help in some localized, priority scenic areas.”

Ken Kowynia, winter sports program manager for the Rocky Mountain Region of the U.S. Forest Service, did his masters thesis on ski area vegetation management and in the early 1980s worked on the ski area vegetation management plans for the four Summit County ski areas in Colorado. He equates injecting pesticides with spraying.

“All you’re doing is buying time for that year or the next year; it’s a short-term solution,” he says. He advocates regeneration cuts in old-growth forest to promote greater species and age diversity. “By suppressing fire in the past century, our management has brought more catastrophic fires into play,” he says.

He says the plans he helped create in the 1980s could have helped keep Colorado out of the crisis it’s in today: “We could have been more proactive. If we had been more aggressive in implementing these re-vegetation plans, then we wouldn’t be having this conversation now.

“We need to be looking past trying to control this current infestation and look into the future at what we can do to nudge the natural process and influence the appearance of future stands—doing it in a way that is integrated with the ski area’s master plan,” he says. “We need to come up with strategies with multiple objectives so we can improve the skiing and improve the health of the stands.”

Only that kind of vision will keep foresters and the ski industry from repeating the mistakes of the past, Kowynia says. “Change is going to happen no matter what we do. You can influence the future, and we should, but it is a natural process and we can’t stop it.”