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Engelmann spruceacross Utah are un-

der attack fromravenous beetlehordes. At left, ahealthy stand of

trees in Fishlake Na-tional Forest in cen-tral Utah. At right, adying mature tree.Englemann spruce— the state’s dom-inant commercial-

grade tree — growslowly in high alti-

tudes, and it will be200 years or more

until they growback to the tower-ing sentinels that

20th-century Utahnsknew.

Engelmannspruceunderattack

Using a green-house gasemissions sce-nario that isproving conser-vative, the For-est Service’sRocky Moun-tain ResearchStation projectsa shrinkingfootprintfor spruce inUtah and theRockies.

Fish Lake • Some three-toedwoodpecker in these woods ispleasantly plump on beetles,but the buffet can’t go on for-ever. It lasts only as long as thetrees.The gluttony is written on

and around a stocky sprucethat looks green and most-ly healthy to the untrainedeye, except for the fact that it’specked nude from the waistdown.

No bird harmed the tree,though. The damage was al-ready done.“These trees are loadedwith

bugs,” said Liz Hebertson, aU.S. Forest Service entomolo-gist, down fromOgden to sur-vey this year’s spruce-beetleinfestation in south-centralUtah. Peeling back a neighbor-ing spruce’s bark confirms thatlarvae arematuring, readyingfor the short flight of their livesin search of new pine prey.It ’s nothing new to her.

Mountains of Utah’s verdantspruce slopes are gone. If cli-mate scientists are right, theymight never be back.After a rain, Utah’s high

spruce forests evoke themistyPacific Northwest — unlikelylush islands rising fromredrockdesert andolivechaparral.Nowa complex set of threats con-spires to take themdown.

One is natural — the beetlewith a taste for older trees, aid-edby adecadeof tree-stressingdrought. Another is a centuryof fire suppression that builtup fuels to the bursting point.Aiding both those killers is arising thermometer.

Even if a warmer climatecan again support Engelmannspruce— the state’s dominantcommercial-grade tree — itwill be 200 years ormore untilthey growback to the towering

sentinels that 20th-centuryUtahns knew. In themeantime,subalpine firs may spring upin their place, replacing greenfor green but not with dollars.Subalpine firs aremore brittle— not lumbermaterial.

A lot of peoplewon’t takeHe-bertson’s advice and break outthe chain saws when spruceneedles are still green and in-viting.But thiswoodpecker tree,andevery treearound it,will bered bynext summer.“They’re dead,” said Fish-

lake National Forest districtsilviculturist Terry Holsclaw,“but they just don’t know it yet.”

Th i s a l p i n egrove, above aflowery mead-ow at nearly11,000 feet, isHolsclaw’s bat-

tleground.Unsure of a climateconnection beyond a basicdrought, he blames time-con-suming battles with environ-mentalists and restrictions onroad building for the spruces’plight. He wants to sell treesfaster than beetles can swarmthem, thinking of it as a me-chanicmight an oil change.

Saving some spruce for lat-er is an investment that willpay off if the nation sees an-other building boom, he said.“That’s when you’ll want thisinventory.”

His attitude strikes some asa return to the glory days ofthe 1980s,when forests aroundhere supplied support timberto coal mines at a dizzyingpace and whenmany distrust-ed a federal agency they con-sidered recklessly industrialist.It isn’t that way now,

Holsclaw said.Getting chain saws into the

forest gives the survivors agreater shareof themountain’swater and sunlight, and a fight-ingchance tocreatea sticky sapto push out invading bugs.

Here at a proposed 1,300-acre logging site called Tee-ples, Holsclaw hopes to headoff a beetle wave that’s beenspreading from the east forseveral years.“Myphilosophy is, if you can

save it, try to save it,” he said.“And if it’s dead, capture thevalue.”

It’s been a losing battle so far,and science suggests it’s a long-run lost cause.

First, there’s the insect’sphysiology and its response toincreasing warmth. The cold-blooded sprucebeetles in thesehills once took two years tomature from the egg and flyon tobreed innew trees. In theearly 2000s, Hebertson said,forest scientists documented aswitch to one-year cycles here,

Beehive State someday couldlook more like northern Nevada.

By BRANDON LOOMISThe Salt Lake Tribune

Threats besetUtah’s spruce

PHOTOS BY AL HARTMANN | The Salt Lake Tribune

which boosted the populationand primed a disaster.

Beetles have taken2millionacres ofUtah forest in roughlythat time, the largest share ofit spruce. The outbreak start-ed in the 1990s around CedarBreaksNationalMonument insouthwesternUtah, whereHe-bertson has seen no evidenceof spruce regeneration since.TheForestServicehas found

that higher temperatures aidand speed beetle production.The Utah Climate Center atUtahStateUniversityfinds thatsince 1970 themercury has ris-en swiftly when it countsmost—more than 3 degrees on aver-age during bug-killing winterlows at amonitoring station atCapitol Reef National Park insouthern-centralUtah.A decade of beetles-gone-

wild might not spell doom innormal conditions. Big out-breaks have shown up before,and the spruce have rebound-ed.This time, though, computermodels based on society’s car-bon emissions aren’t lookinggood. They show Engelmannspruce practically blinking outin Utah by 2090, limited to astrand in theHighUintas.Most ofUtah’s high-country

spruce, plus the firs that asso-ciate with them, are in trou-ble— even under conservativecarbon-emission models plot-ted by Idaho-based scientistsat the Forest Service’s RockyMountain Research Station.

At Brighton, for instance,themean annual temperatureon its spruce-lined slopes isexpected to rise by century’send above the 1961-90 “cur-rent” normby awhopping 5½degrees Celsius.

Such a jump, according toForest Service projections,would more than double themountains’ growing seasonto 140 frost-free days, closingin on what exists today thou-sands of feet downslope in SaltLakeCity. It’s not spruce coun-try, and, if this scenario playsout, neither would be most ofUtah’smountains.

“The future certainly doesn’tlook good for these alpine spe-cies,” said Jerry Rehfeldt, aretired plant geneticist whoworked on the tree-habitatprojections at a lab inMoscow,Idaho. “I thinkwe can say, pos-itively, Engelmann sprucewillhave a much smaller role inUtah than it does today.”

Gradually, Rehfeldt said,dryland species would moveuphill while desertificationtakes hold in the foothills.Utah would look more likenorthernNevada.“The big winner throughout

theGreat Basin,” Rehfeldt said,“is desert scrub.”

Something besidesclimate helpedbu i ld today ’smassive beetleoutbreaks.A n d r e a

Brunelle, a University of Utahpaleoecologist, studies lakesediments with pollen depos-its to determine when treesthrived andwhen they died.

Utah pioneers made theirmark on the forest, she said,and it’s showing now. Startingin the 1850s, theyaxed trees. Inplaces such as theMarkaguntPlateau east ofCedarCity, theylogged the land bare. The ho-mogenous forest that grewbackisfilledwitha single generationof trees uniformly susceptibleto drought and other stresses.“Themagnitude of these out-

breaks,” Brunelle said, “mightbe different just because ofthe historic land-managementpractices.”For those trying to prune

the forest and strengthenwhatremains, administrative head-aches persist. One, in FishlakeNational Forest, is a Clinton-era rule that prevents build-ing roads intowild areas.Mostof the forest’s spruce grow inthe roadless high country,Holsclaw said.“It’s more the roadless area

than anything else that’s the

Current suitablehabitat: Engel-mann spruce habi-tat across the West

By 2030: Across theWest, spruce densi-ty on the decline

By 2060: UintaRange among lastbastions for habitat

By 2090: Engel-mann habitat se-verely diminished

Note: Based on InternationalPanel on Climate Change “A2”scenario.

Sources: International Journalof Plant Sciences, U.S. ForestService

The Salt Lake Tribune

Zachary Williams, a for-estry technician with theU.S Forest Service, exam-ines a group of Engel-mann spruce in FishlakeNational Forest.

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