A power boat creates waves in front of forests devastated by pine beetles on Shadow Mountain Reservoir in Grand County.
It was around 2000 when foresters in Grand County recognized the pine beetle outbreak as a true epidemic, rather than one of the small outbreaks common in any pine forest
The mountain pine beetle, which is expected to destroy up to 90 percent of the lodgepole pine forests in Eagle County, has definitely done its damage in Grand County .
Within three to five years of dying, a lodgepole pine is so deteriorated and dry that it can’t be sold as commercial lumber — and you can see much of this useless wood left behind.
Many homes, surrounded by the skeletal remains of long-dead pine trees, look like the sole, untouched survivors of cataclysmic fires. Grand Lake resident Bob Means says that even after spraying all the trees around his house, they still had to cut several down.
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