The critter that's turning vast swatches of Colorado's forest a melancholy, rusty red was here long before you were, and will be here long after you go.
Next year these dead forests will be even bigger, but it's all part of the ecosystem - so learn to deal with it.
That was the "glass half-full" message Wednesday of a group of bark beetle experts who took the media on a trek through forests that resembled a weird Harry Potter fantasy landscape.
"What we see now is sort of shocking, but we're missing the long perspective - this is a natural process," said scientist and researcher Dominik Kulakowski. "We have to get used to a different way the landscape looks."
The tour, arranged by environmental groups, was to promote the view that the dead, red forests probably pose little or no additional fire danger (hot, dry conditions are the real culprit) and that people who want to live in forests have to accept what forests do.
However, the extent of the fire danger is an open question, Bob Cain of the U.S. Forest Service said later Wednesday.
Last year, Sen. Ken Salazar warned that the increased wildfire threat created by millions of beetle-killed pines could be the "Katrina of the West."
In any case, the beetle experts agreed, the 150-year cycle is too far gone to be reversed. The affected forestland "will regenerate, but it will take decades to a century," Kulakowski said.
The tiny beetle with a gourmet's appetite for lodgepole pines has lived in Colorado for eons, most times invisibly. But since the late 1990s, warm and dry conditions have sent the beetles roaring through stands of lodgepole like a crazed army. The U.S. Forest Service estimates that, ultimately, the beetle will impact 640,000 acres of Colorado.
There was an even more sobering prediction made Wednesday: 80 percent to 90 percent of mature lodgepole pines in northern Colorado and southern Wyoming will be dead in the next four to five years, said Rob Davis, president of the Forest Energy Corp.
The vastness of the problem has united the Colorado congressional delegation. Two weeks ago they threw their weight behind legislation to commit $22 million to help the Forest Service and local communities combat wildfire threats and protect water supplies, which arguably could be affected by thousands of acres of dead forests.
The "live and let live" beetle approach didn't satisfy John and Cindy Wilmot, who were hiking above Lake Dillon as the media caravan passed by.
The Wilmots, of Highlands Ranch, own a nearby mountain home, where a muted red stain is spreading slowly across the land.
"It's terrible, awful up here," John Wilmot said. "We've been coming here 25 years and this is the worst."
The Wilmots said the Forest Service used to try to contain the problem by spraying insecticide and covering affected trees in plastic, but no more.
Those strategies weren't cost effective, and now the problem's too far gone anyway, said Barry Smith, head of emergency management in Eagle County and one of Wednesday's speakers.
"(Bark beetles) are a part of nature. If you move up here to be in nature, you need to let nature take its course."Rocky Mountain News
