RVers will have fewer places to camp this summer in Colorado and Wyoming thanks to bugs. The U.S. Forest Service has closed 21 popular campgrounds in the two states because trees killed by hungry bark beetles could case the trees to topple onto RVs and tents. Warmer temperatures this year have weakened already aging lodgepole pines that are still standing because wildfires haven’t thinned their ranks. The beetles now infest nearly 3,600 square miles of forest in the two states.
Forest Service officials say that while campgrounds in other parts of the U.S. have closed before because of of beetle infestations, it’s never been on the scale of the current closures. Forests in Montana, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona also have beetle infestations, but there are no plans to close any campgrounds there this summer.
This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 10:40 am and is filed under Campgrounds, Colorado, Wyoming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
This doesn’t help a lot if you don’t list the campgrounds which were closed.
So, rather than cutting the potentially dangerous trees and make them available for camping firewood, they simply close down the campgrounds. Typical short-sighted government solution. Next, they’ll complain that due to lack of camping revenue from these 21 campgrounds, they’ll raise the rates at the rest of them….just watch.
I live in a county inj Colorado where 7 of our campgrounds are closed for the summer. Two thoughts: first, it is because the beetles have infested us because we have not had any wildfires to thin the forest, USFS sounds like a bunch of pyromaniacs in the way they want to burn off our forests; second, spring of 2007, we had a major wind storm come through Summit County and it blew over many, many trees. The trees that were blown down were live trees not beetle killed ones. This is just another example of the US government cutting back on the services of “WE, the People!!!
They wanted to close a lot of campgrounds before for several reasons but ran into too much resistance from the public so now they enter from the backdoor and use the beetlekill as an excuse. The beetle kill has been going on for over 25 years but now they decide to close campgrounds. Poor excuse is better than no excuse. I have camped in Colorado for a great many years and this is just another was to save money and shut out the public from our National forests.Don’t believe it?? just take a drive through a Nat. Forest and look at all the green steel gates on all the roads
I agree that this article is not helpful at all, if you do not include a list of closed campgrounds.
Check these links:
http://www.fs.fed.us/r2/bark-beetle/
http://www.fs.fed.us/r2/bark-beetle/BBIM_Implementation_Plan_Narrative.pdf
The article lists Idaho. Last year while camping in the Martin Lake section of Bull Trout near Stanley in the Sawtooth National Forest, the Forest Service was cutting down a lot of the infested trees on the main road into the campground. Traffic was halted while they cut and moved the trees. What they were going to do with the trees, I don’t know but they were cutting the badly infested ones. On the good trees they hung beetle pherenome traps to stimulate the presence of beetles in some sort of gestational or mating period (don’t remember exactly) to keep beetles away - it was a pheranome trap that tricked them into thinking that the area was taken so that they wouldn’t move in.
I cannot understand why the closed campgrounds aren’t listed. I would think that the Forestry Service would assist it’s users. Please do us a favor - soon. The real problem is that the gov’t. keeps cutting the budget for the Forestry Service so they probably do not have any choice but to close them - just let us know who they are. Did they ever think about using convicts to assist in forest clearing? We don’t have to pay them - what a logical thought.
The “Back door” comment is right on. The Gov. uses this tactic all the time to justify doing something the public doesn’t want. Budget cuts are the predominant problem. Brought about by over spending in King George’s war. Gov. services have been in a downward spiral since the second year of the fiasco.
Try these sources, there are contact numbers listed:
http://www.fs.fed.us/r2/bark-beetle/epidemic/news/Threforestclosures.pdf
http://www.fs.fed.us/r2/recreation/camping/campgroundlist/#whiteriver
http://www.fs.fed.us/r2/recreation/camping/campgroundlist/
Instead of complaining about the ‘evil’ back-dooring government, the leaders you do and don’t like, and all the problems… why not run for office?… change things… raise money for the National Park Service… organize volunteers to help… do something besides blame others and the government.