Colorado’s current epidemic of spruce beetles began with an unusual storm in October 1997. Corkscrewing through the state, the storm dumped snow on the high plains and killed 50,000 cattle. Then, like an afterthought, the winds swooped across the Continental Divide near the Wyoming border uncharacteristically from the east. Screaming in bursts of jet engine intensity, the winds knocked down trees on chunks of 13,000 acres of federal land. A band of elk hunters at the blowdown’s center, north of Steamboat Springs, sleeplessly hugged the log walls of a cabin that night as hundred-foot Englemann spruce crashed around them. Emerging the next morning, they spent three days chain-sawing out of the maze of splintered timber that in places stood fifteen to twenty feet high. Nobody had ever seen anything like it.

What came next was also unusual. The U.S. Forest Service refused to fling itself into an attack on natural processes. An epidemic of spruce bark beetles should be expected, said foresters, but no major efforts would be made to control the epidemic. Several salvage sales of about 4,000 acres were authorized, but in areas that might have been logged anyway. Pointedly, the agency rebuffed calls to invade designated wilderness and roadless areas, where most of the downed trees lay. Only in selected areas, adjacent to ski slopes, homes and campgrounds, could anything practical be done to stop the beetles, said foresters. There was no mention of marauding hordes, no call to battle, no proclamation of war.

From bugs to big burns, federal land managers have been nudged by research ecologists during the last two decades into rethinking the role of infrequent large-scale disturbances. The impulse to take action is much more subdued.

“We didn’t say that we were going to try to stop the epidemic. We didn’t think we could because of the fact that so much of the blowdown was inaccessible,” says Frank Cross, the Forest Service team leader on the Routt blowdown.

This deference to nature’s way did not come naturally to foresters. “When we first looked at [the blowdown], everyone was calling it a catastrophe and other value-laden terms. Because it’s a natural event, we wound up coining some words for our use, and we were constantly correcting each other. I think our thinking has changed quite a lot in recent years.”

Tom Veblen, an ecologist at the University of Colorado who specializes in forest disturbances, agrees. “Certainly, there are a lot of people, including professional foresters both within and outside of the Forest Service, who would still give primary priority to the timber values and would have done everything they could have to prevent a beetle outbreak at the Routt blowdown,” he says. “But I think that has been shown to be a minority view. The management response was relatively limited.”

But the story is yet incomplete, both at the Routt blowdown and at other large-scale disturbances on public land across the West. Just how politicians and the public respond to swaths of forest turning dull orange and then gray may yet be the critical part of the story. Will they want action—any action—to right a perceived wrong? A sampling of stories in Colorado’s largest newspapers last summer suggests the old impulse lingers in the public. “These pests and their kin could soon become as big an enemy to Colorado’s forests as wildfires,” warned the Denver Post. The blight, said the Rocky Mountain News, “has destroyed more Colorado woodlands than last year’s Ha le largest challenge facing federal land and resources managers today,” said Representative Scott McInnis, a Republican from Colorado who has been a prime mover of President Bush’s Healthy Forests Initiative.

The public, the papers and the politicians might be advised to recall another blowdown, another spruce beetle outbreak and another attempt to wage war before sending warriors to new forest battle lines. That story began with hurricane-intensity winds blown by a mid-June storm in 1939. Howling across the state’s western slope, the storm knocked over many trees, including those on several hundred acres between Steamboat Springs and Glenwood Springs in an area called the White River Plateau, more commonly known as the Flat Tops. Spruce beetles, which were verging on an epidemic, were found in 1941 to have infested large numbers of standing trees.

The Forest Service for several years did nothing. Labor and materials were scarce during World War II, and entomologists admitted they had no good idea how to control the beetles. By the war’s end, the Forest Service decided that the infested area on the White River Plateau was too broad for effective control work.

By 1949, with the toll estimated at 3.5 billion board feet, the beetles flew across fifteen to twenty miles of the largely treeless valley of the Colorado River to establish themselves in spruce-fir forests between the towns of Eagle and Aspen. This time, the Forest Service decided to make “an all-out attempt to hold the beetle to its then extensive area by fighting it along the outbreak’s perimeter,” Arthur L. Nelson, chief of timber management for the Forest Service, recalled in an essay several years later. The agency’s primary strategy was to poison the beetles.

DDT sprayed from the air was ineffective because foliage screened so much that little got to the tree trunks, where the beetles were. Instead, in an experiment in 1949, the agency had field crews apply insecticide to 3,000 trees. At $5 a tree, the costs were considered high—almost unimaginably high when perhaps several million trees would need to be treated. Still, by then, many were beginning to call this a national emergency.

Newspaper and magazine stories, as well as a film produced for the Forest Service, tell the story of the next several years with the solemn language borrowed from war. World War II was fresh in everyone’s mind, and there was a new war in Korea. Change the names, and the accounts sounded much the same: Chinese communist hordes and spruce beetle invaders.

“Disaster—more destructive than the consuming torch of all the forest fires of a generation rolled into one huge blaze—is whacking silent, murderous swaths through Colorado’s famous spruce,” wrote the Denver Post in 1946. It was an “invasion that combines the destructive power of a fifth column with that of a full-scale panzer attack,” added the writer. Revisiting the subject in 1949, the newspaper described a “trail of destruction unparalleled in history.”

Scarcely less sensational was the Christian Science Monitor in 1951, which ran a Forest Service employee report that declared the effort of spruce beetle suppression to be the “most gigantic battle in the history of the United States Forest Service.” Already, advised the author, a Forest Service information officer, “enough wood had been lost to provide shelter for all the people who live in Boston.” The loss of 4 billion board feet, he added, could quintuple unless the beetles were checked.

To sustain this war, the Forest Service had to get annual congressional appropriations. This was, declared one young U.S. representative from Colorado, Wayne Aspinall, a nonpartisan issue on which Democrats and Republicans could unite. The enemy, in addition to beetles, was a wrong-thinking congressman from Mississippi, Representative Jamie L. Whitten, who openly questioned whether the timber stands in Colorado were worth preserving. The Denver Post, which by then had taken on the beetle cause as a pet project for its self-described “Rocky Mountain Empire,” was clear where its sympathies lay. “Pests Riot as Congress Nods,” said the paper in early 1950. Countering Whitten, the Post found a lumberman in Colorado who declared that there would be “ten or fifteen lumber camps here in ten years for every one that’s here now, if we can control the beetles.” Not missing a beat, the paper also reported that wildlife were suffering. Already, porcupines were descending from the higher forests to ranches, and even chipmunks were being displaced.

When money was finally authorized, two camps were set up, in Eagle and in Kremmling. From there, crews were dispatched to the various “battlefronts.” From these bases, an insecticide, orthodichlorobenzene, was distributed to outlying camps to be mixed with six parts diesel fuel. Five-gallon cans, World War II surplus, were carried by truck, jeep or pack animals to the crews. New roads were blazed to the spruce-fir zone, mostly 9,000 to 11,000 feet in elevation. Spotting trees infected by spruce beetles wasn’t hard, says one young forester of the time, Philip S. Miller, now retired in Telluride, Colorado. All he had to do was look at the base of the trees from where natural predators, woodpeckers, had chipped away at the bark. With one man pumping, another drenched the tree at thirty to thirty-five feet up the trunk, allowing the solution to trickle down. At 1.28 gallons per tree, more than a million gallons of insecticide were applied. The cost was $2 million. Miller doesn’t remember talk of war among workers but he remembers a lot of cussing.

Late that summer, the Forest Service assembled 1,500 laborers. In its public pronouncements, the agency talked about putting college boys to work, and they probably got jobs. But for the tiresome and, in retrospect, dangerous work of spraying the trees, the agency recruited from Denver’s skid row, Larimer Street. Coming up short there, the work force was filled out with men from the Navajo Nation in Arizona. In all, they drenched nearly 800,000 trees that summer.

Still, the work in 1950 wasn’t enough. Entomologists called for spraying more trees the next year. So the war continued. The Denver Post lobbied Congress directly for money, sending every member a vial of bark beetles. At stake in this “tree by tree battle,” said the newspaper, was nothing less than saving the “forests in the Rocky Mountain Empire from extinction.” A timber industry spokesman predicted that the industry “in these mountain states could double in four or five years—or be put out of business—depending on whether we stop the beetles now.” A full one-third of Colorado’s forests would be “lost,” warned experts. But it wasn’t just about money; it was also about beauty. The newspaper cited dead trees within three miles of Rocky Mountain National Park, suggesting that the denuding of the entire park was at hand. Even Yellowstone National Park, 300 miles away, was threatened.

Congress delivered. A few weeks after crews set out, the Forest Service announced victory over what the Post described as “the greatest forest insect plague ever recorded.” Spraying of the 1.25 million trees had been “effective beyond expectation,” reported the newspaper. Foresters also credited increased activity by woodpeckers and parasites of spruce beetles.

But the real story was a cold snap eighteen months before. As foresters had guessed, beetles could not survive temperatures of minus thirty degrees. On February 1, 1951, it got much colder—forty-nine degrees below zero in Kremmling, fifty-six degrees below zero in Eagle. The “beetle bombers” from the Piney River country north of Vail and other spraying crews abandoned their work with such haste that hikers still stumble across cans of insecticide that were left behind.

Contrary to the dire warnings, not all the timber was destroyed. At least 100 million board feet of timber was used to make pulp in Wisconsin, and small logging contractors harvested standing dead trees until the late 1990s for use in home construction. By the end of the twentieth century, many people new to the region had no clue about the great war against the spruce beetle. The battleground was just another pretty forest.

Colorado’s spruce beetle epidemic of the 1940s and 1950s and the Forest Service response should be seen in terms of what historian Paul Hirt calls technocratic optimism. Examining the Forest Service after World War II in his book A Conspiracy of Optimism, Hirt writes that “foresters came to believe that their overriding purpose was not so much to protect the national forests but rather to develop their resources to meet the material needs of the American people. They saw their mission as one of overcoming limits, not establishing them. A consciously disseminated ‘can-do’ technocratic optimism imbued the Forest Service with a sense of mission and excitement.”

Underlying this mission, says Hirt, was “American enthusiasm for unending economic growth and technological manipulation of natural systems in pursuit of wealth and national power. The Forest Service was equally an advocate and a victim of this ideology.”

The Forest Service has changed, as witnessed on the Routt blowdown, but Greg Applet, a senior forest scientist for the Wilderness Society, sometimes wonders how much. “I still think there’s an awful lot of bug chasing that goes on out there,” he says. “I think a lot of people think that any tree death is bad, unless it’s by our hand.” Whatever the problem, he adds, be it insects or fire, there always seems to be one and only one solution: too many trees.

Part of the story, he suggests, is jobs. “In 1992, I testified before Congress on the issue of forest health, and it was clear to me then that there was this kind of, you wouldn’t call it a conspiracy, but all the forces were lined up to hype a forest health crisis. The agencies would get more money, research would get more money, industry would obviously get the benefit of salvage sales, but even the environmental community was kind of able to say, see, it’s fifty years of mismanagement that has led to this situation.”

Honesty, agrees Bill Heicher, a retired state wildlife biologist in Colorado, is the base issue. Innumerable times during his thirty-year career, says Heicher, timber sales on his district were justified—falsely—as being beneficial to wildlife. “I’m not against timber sales, but I am against them saying they will benefit wildlife when they don’t have a clue what will benefit wildlife. It used to be wildlife. Now it’s bugs. They’d all be better off if they would just be honest.”

The story of spruce beetles remains unfinished. The beetles are spreading; trees dying far beyond the Routt and other blowdowns. The Forest Service has so far shown restraint, even as the public and politicians have begun talking the language of war. Cross, now the regional forest health leader for the Forest Service, points out that he is an adviser, not a decision maker, but he knows what advice he’ll give.

“I’ll tell them to pick their battles,” he says. “There I go, using the words of war. But I will tell them to choose those areas where you really want to take a stand against the bark beetle—they will be places like ski areas, municipal watersheds, habitat for threatened and endangered species, areas near homes. Thinning in advance of epidemics protects forests from bugs, but too many areas are too steep, too wet or otherwise inaccessible to make thinning a broad option. So pick your battles wisely because you can’t hope to suppress the beetles altogether. The area is just too broad, and the forces of nature are just too great.”