The state has been burning for days. He jetted off to at least two fund raisers during that time.
Tree-killing bark beetles decimated 550,000 acres of forests in Colorado and Wyoming last year, bringing the total area ravaged by the insects in both states to 4 million acres since 1996, the U.S. Forest Service said on Sunday.
“The significance is that the trajectory is moving north and east into more visible and populated areas,” Janelle Smith, spokeswoman for the U.S. Forest Service, told Reuters.
Federal and state foresters just released their annual aerial survey of impacted lands across the two Rocky Mountain states. The main culprit is the mountain pine beetle responsible for infesting 400,000 acres in Colorado and southern Wyoming.
The burrowing insects are moving into ponderosa pine forests from lodgepole pine stands along the Continental Divide, Smith said.
The spruce beetle, more active in southern Colorado, attacked an additional 150,000 acres in 2010, the report noted.
The 4-million-acre combined tally accounts for less than a quarter of the estimated 17.5 million acres of trees attacked by bark beetles across the interior American West as a whole, including Idaho, Montana, Utah and New Mexico, since the 1990s, the Forest Service said.