GRANBY, COLO. -- The pine trees cradling this mountain town are dying, turned rusty red by a beetle that is destroying the Rockies' forests.
The brittle corpses are an eyesore as well as a major fire hazard. When they collapse, they make hillsides unstable, increasing erosion and damming streams that feed into the Colorado River, which provides drinking water to seven states and Mexico.
But Randy Piper is trying to focus on the positive.
He moved here four years ago, scanned the hillsides and saw opportunity. Now he has a small showroom displaying beetle-killed pine logs that have been sculpted into doors, moldings or pieces for log cabins.
Piper emphasized the light blue streaks that run down the tawny wood, markers left by the parasites. "We're calling it blue pine," he said. "Sounds a lot sexier than beetle-kill."
As lodgepole pines by the millions topple in the West, a crop of entrepreneurs is sprouting to figure out what to do with their remains. The bark-beetle plague has injected new life into struggling sawmills and timber towns. People like Piper are selling the wood as a designer material. Others are transforming the downed trees into fuel pellets that can heat buildings.
"It brings a tear to your eye if you've grown up here or live here," Mark Mathis, chief executive officer of Confluence Energy in Kremmling, which is building a fuel-pellet mill, said of the beetles' destruction. "But at least we're trying to do something constructive."
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In the Rockies, Warming Pushes Tiny, Destructive Bark Beetle into Lower Altitudes
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Building on the trunks of ruined pines
As bark beetles ravage Rocky Mountain forests, entrepreneurs scramble to find uses for the dead wood left behind
By Nicholas Riccardi
The Los Angeles Times, December 27, 2007
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