If you hunt in Colorado or any place with big ponderosa pine, you’ve probably noticed hillsides going rust-colored. In places, whole drainages look like they’ve been scorched by wildfire. But this isn’t leftover fire damage. It’s mountain pine beetles.
And right now, they are coming back at ponderosa forests in Colorado after years in the background, according to the University of Colorado, Boulder.
If you hunt deer or elk in big timber (or dream of it), you’re going to need to pay attention.
Colorado has already lived through this once with lodgepole pine. Millions of acres died off in the 2000s, according to the Colorado State Forest Service. Now the beetles have shifted hard into ponderosa pine, especially along the Front Range and foothills. That’s a different forest type, and one a lot of hunters rely on for early-season elk, mule deer, turkeys, and access routes into higher country.
And the outlook is pretty grim. The U.S. Forest Service is predicting that pine beetles could kill nearly all mature ponderosa pine trees along the Front Range.
Meet the Culprit
Mountain pine beetles are native. They’ve always been around, quietly thinning weak trees. The problem now is scale. Warm winters no longer thin their numbers, and drought-stressed trees can’t push enough sap to fight them off. When those two things line up, the bugs turn up their destructive tendencies fast.
Mountain pine beetles don’t look hearty enough to take down big pines. About the size of a grain of rice, a single mountain pine beetle is harmless. But these bugs don’t hunt solo. They gang up on a pine, bore under the bark, and lay eggs. The larvae chew up the tissue that moves water and nutrients through the tree. Once that’s damaged, the tree’s done.
What Dead Pines Mean for Game
Ponderosa forests are prime habitat for elk, deer, turkeys, and mountain lions. As beetles kill trees, the structure that once offered shade, browse corridors, and ambush cover disappears. Young timber grows back slower than you’d think. Some scientists estimate that without active regeneration, forests could take decades to return to their former density.
Dead trees dry out and fall, adding fuel for fires that are already more common in Colorado’s hotter, drier climate. The Cameron Peak and East Troublesome fires in 2020 burned 700,000 acres, making them the largest in state history. Fires ran deep into the fall, shutting down hunts and even triggering refunds for nearly 3,000 elk and deer tags in affected units.
When forests thin out from beetle kill, snow melts sooner. Streams run earlier and drier. That changes everything from rut timing to cold water refuges for trout. Trails through beetle-killed stands also get sketchy fast as trees fall across roads and routes.
Battling it Out with the Beetles
The state is focusing on private lands and helping some landowners manage forests on their property. Taking out beetles isn’t simple. Sick trees have to be felled and either burned or stripped of bark, then left under plastic in the summer sun for months to bake any surviving bugs. It works on a small scale. However, carrying the effort out on thousands of acres of public forest land isn’t practical or even feasible.
That’s why the outlook for ponderosa forests over the next decade isn’t great. The beetles are running their course, and much of the forest is on its own.
For hunters, it’s worth paying attention. The woods are going to look different in the coming years. Dead timber, new growth, and changing cover could have a huge impact on hunting for quite some time.
