Posted on 05/18/2010 12:29:25 PM PDT by GSWarrior
DENVER -- This should be the golden season across the West, when aspen paint hillsides in shades of fall.
But a mysterious ailment -- or perhaps a combination of factors -- is killing hundreds of thousands of acres of the trees from Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona through Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and into Canada, according to the U.S. government and independent scientists.
The aspen die-off comes on the heels of a pine-beetle invasion that has destroyed millions of acres of evergreens. Foresters expect to lose virtually every mature lodgepole pine in Colorado -- five million acres of them.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Is this the same bug that killed all the pinon pine
along I-25 north of Santa Fe?
this is breathtakingly sad, the fall aspen are glorious
the Rocky Mountains will look sadly rocky without foliage
The Pine Beetle is still munching the forests.
But the article is about deciduous aspen trees, not pine.
Support logging!
Old trees are weak trees!
Bush’s fault.
Revelation 8:7
The first angel sounded his trumpet, and there came hail and fire mixed with blood, and it was hurled down upon the earth. A third of the earth was burned up, a third of the trees were burned up, and all the green grass was burned up............
Great pun!...........
-yeah, not enough wolves , that's it--
--in the Frisco-Dillon area , at least it caused some humor--the bug trees turn rust-red the first year after they die, causing tourists to query as to "how do I get one of those pretty red trees" or comment on the refreshing red after all that boring green---
And DDT is still outlawed and for no reason what so ever. You can tell if a pine is going to die by looking at the top of it. It dies from the top down.
—ping—
The MSM last year declared the die off to be the fault of global warming. The science being settled, it’s not necessary to explain why cold wet weather hasn’t had any effect.
And you can bet that non of them can or will be used for lumber.
BTW, I didn't realize that the WSJ wrote their articles so far in advance ;o)
OnlineWSJ.com ^ | Oct. 15, 2010 | Stephanie Simon
Well, I suspect that one cause is mismanagement of the forests, which does not allow harvesting of mature trees. Nature needs man as a participant, IMHO. And before the U.S. government put all these forests off limits, the Indians helped take care of them.
Weak trees and dying trees tend to harbor pests and interfere with new growth.
Look at it as redistribution of the Earth.
The title says it was published next fall...
We went to SD for vacation and went out of our way to see how the pines were holding out there : I saw a few red pines, but not many.
We're going to Arkansas this August. I hope the beautiful Ozarks are OK. According to what I read, pine tree forests from Mexico to Canada have been devastated. :-(
I mis-typed. It was published last October. Sorry for the confusion.
In British Columbia, the response was: "The pine beetles are killing off our trees and decimating our logging industry. Someone (i.e., the taxpayers) must provide financial assistance to help us."
In Alberta, the response was: "If the pine beetles are going to kill off our trees, let's cut them down and sell the lumber while we still can!"
“The title says it was published next fall..”
by Tachyon Press!
Trees have rotted before, too.
The allepo pines in the Phoenix area are being severely hit. I just had two 40’ trees removed from my yard with another due to be taken out shortly. Funny thing about this is that the City of Phoenix has gone on a mission to cite homeowners for violations. It is against city ordinance to have a dead tree in your own back yard. This is their new effort to collect revenues. I chose to pay the landscaper $2000.00 to remove them rather than give one single penny to Phil Gordon.
South Dakota has several thousand acres affected near Custer State Park and there are more sick and dying trees showing up in the Deadwood-Lead area---
Oh, no! :-( Custer State Park, Mt Rushmore state park, and Wind Cave (?) National Park were all so beautiful! I hope SD is able to stop (and hopefully reverse) the damage. :-(
So whatever attacks “one” tree is, in reality, attacking every aspen in sight - and up the hill and down the valley and over the mountain and....
But nature has her reasons and her seasons. Man just needs to get the heck out of the way
—basically, it’s unstoppable—there are too many acres and each tree has to be sprayed individually at the appropriate time in the life cycle of the bugs, IIRC—
Are they issuing any permits for people to harvest them? No, not as far as I know.
Now the trees are just dying, unused---
At least we'll always have the pictures!
The bugs haven’t reached Climax ?
Make a good size picnic bench out of them. If they can, make them out of 4x6’s. Other than that, sorry to hear you lost the trees. DDT would have stopped the lose....from what I understand.
—(snicker)—way too many of them have -—
“lose” should have been “Loss”. Sorry about that. Thought I would correct it before someone else did...LOL
This was my thought, too. A judgement plague.
Thanks.
We love them, but Aspen trees are just big weeds.
Each individual tree can live for 40–150 years above ground, but the root system of the colony is long-lived. In some cases, this is for thousands of years, sending up new trunks as the older trunks die off above ground.
One such colony in Utah, given the nickname of “Pando”, is claimed to be 80,000 years old, making it possibly the oldest living colony of aspens.
http://www.answers.com/topic/aspen
Second, pine beetles are not the worry on aspen trees. IMO
“Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them.”
No one likes to look at dead forests, but the most serious effects of this will be reservoirs and lakes filling up with sediment, as well as being a serious fire hazard.
***We’re going to Arkansas this August. I hope the beautiful Ozarks are OK.***
They are still green! Lots of rain this year.
When I was young we lived in the Rockies. I saw lots of beautiful trees there in the fall.
Then my dad got a wild hair and decided to move us, kicking and screaming to the Ozarks.
I remember one year in school one teacher said to another,”Aren’t the trees beautiful this year!”
Being used to the Rockies, all I saw were dingey reds, dingey yellows. dingey orange. None of the Brilliant colors I saw in the Rockies!
Just pulling your finger
I'm glad to hear AR has thus far been spared the blight. I hope that somehow, some way, the western states (and MX and CN) will find a currently unknown cure or treatment or at least a way to stop the beetles-*something*.
Pando may be a million years old. They are really unsure. It may also be the largest living organism in the world.
My aspens are in great shape and I see beautiful aspen forests all over Colorado so not sure what disease the foresters are seeing. I am in Colorado Springs but travel all over the state and things seem fine. The pines are being attacked by beetles but that is par for the course. The tree huggers won’t allow logging roads or logging so it is a major issue.
We have had forest fires and blowdowns. Both make a forest weak and they need to be logged. I can spray my property but millions of acres have to be handled differently.
I am smoking a fine cigar and looking at the forest and we are fine here. Summit County and other areas have been devastated though and I feel for their plight.
Logging would have helped slow down the pine beetles and provided good jobs removing the already dead & infected pine trees. That would have helped the un-infected pine trees.
Our DUmmie congresscritters are pushing for more wilderness and closing of more existing roads...before they are voted out.
Waiting for the next massive forest fire where the fire fighters can not use the existing fire roads.
There are other “plagues” of tree deaths that don’t get much attention in the media:
chestnut ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chestnut_blight )
elm ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_elm_disease )
citrus ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrus_canker )
pine ( http://www.forestpests.org/southern/southernpinebeetle.html )
and several others.............
Thank you.
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