CODY, Wyo. (AP) - About 70 percent of the trees along the North Fork of the Shoshone River in the Shoshone National Forest will die from a beetle infestation, district ranger Brent Larson said.
The gray- and red-needled, dying trees are "symptomatic of problems throughout the West," Larson said.
"They're not unique to Cody and the North Fork corridor," he said. "It's Mother Nature's way of cleaning up a forest."
While trees harbor an endemic population of beetles, the insects found an easy entree into the forest stressed by the 1988 fires.
"They hit the mother lode," Larson said.
In the last four or five years the beetle devastation has accelerated because of the drought, he said.
The infestation begins with a female beetle who finds a tree and emits a pheromone. The males follow and when the density peaks, "The party's over," Larson said.
The female lays eggs around the trunk, which girdles and kills the tree. Larson knows of no effective treatment besides a fire or weather.
"A really cold, long, nasty winter would kill the beetles," he said.
Other options are limited because of the forest's terrain, structures and its function as crucial range for elk and bighorn sheep.
Forest officials are concerned about the infestation because of the decline in forest habitat and deciduous trees, fuel build up and threat of wildfire. A fire along the river's corridor would threaten to close U.S. 14-16-20, which passes through Cody and into Yellowstone National Park.
"The corridor is the life blood for the community and the Big Horn Basin," Larson said.
Additional concerns are public safety, water quality and visual resources.
Driven by those concerns, forest managers decided to launch a vegetative management plan, which would produce a diverse, uneven-age forest.
Some possible treatments include eliminating conifer encroachment, constructing sheltered fuel breaks through thinning, conducting prescribed burns, creating defensible spaces around structures and opening up areas for deciduous trees.
The options would apply to the corridor outside wilderness, mainly along the Shoshone River. In the wilderness, Larson said, the fire policy dictates assessing the risk of letting a fire burn.
"With the corridor's condition, we're in full suppression mode every time we get a fire," he added.
