Boulder County Meeker Park Community Forestry Sort Yard to reopen in May

The Boulder County Forest Health Initiative is pleased to announce that the popular Community Forestry Sort Yard program will be offered again in 2010. The CFSY program was established in 2008 as a public service to help forest landowners become more active stewards of their land and to increase utilization of locally produced sustainable wood products.

A collaborative effort with Peak to Peak Wood, the program seeks to provide private forest landowners a free-of-charge location to dispose of trees cut from their land during forest health improvement, bark beetle, and defensible space cutting projects. Boulder County’s forests face numerous challenges, but the sort yards will help landowners create healthier forest ecosystems and respond to the widespread bark beetle epidemic.

Community Forestry Sort Yard 2010 operation schedule:

• The Meeker Park CFSY, located on the Peak-to-Peak Highway near Meeker Park, will reopen to private forest landowners in early May and will operate until mid-July. The site, serving north Boulder County and southern Larimer County residents, will operate Tuesday-Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
• The new Nederland CFSY, located on Ridge Road just north of Nederland, is anticipated to open in early August and will operate into October. Hours for this site, serving southern Boulder County residents, have not yet been determined.

Dates, hours, and locations of the sort yards are weather dependant and subject to change; residents should check www.bouldercounty.org/foresthealth for the most up-to-date operational information. Please visit http://www.peaktopeakwood.org/ before starting your cutting projects to ensure that you cut logs to required lengths.

Bark beetle epidemic escalates on Front Range:

The main justification for establishing Community Forestry Sort Yards in Boulder County is to help forest landowners respond to the ever increasing bark beetle outbreak. Bark beetle populations continue to spread in Boulder County and have now impacted more than 97,000 acres of forest in the county. Patches of dead, red trees are becoming more visible each year, especially along the Peak-to-Peak corridor and many private forest landowners have already removed dozens of beetle killed trees from their backyard forest. Unfortunately, beetles are expected to continue to march out of higher elevation forests and into the lower elevation ponderosa pine belt.

The epidemic is not over on the Front Range, and if it continues along its current trajectory, many of the largest pines, including lower elevation ponderosa pine, will be red and dead in the coming years. A look to Larimer County shows what may be in store for Boulder County’s forests. In 2009, Larimer County saw a doubling of red, dead trees with almost 500,000 total acres of forest impacted by beetles.

On a statewide level, bark beetles have chewed their way through 2.9 million acres of mature pine forest. By the time this bark beetle epidemic comes to a close most Coloradoans will have felt direct or indirect impacts of bark beetles. Forest landowners and recreationists will experience the most direct impacts; however, people living out of the forest on the plains have the potential to be indirectly impacted by beetle ravaged forests. The water that comes out of plains dweller’s faucets flows from bark beetle impacted forests and if a large wildfire starts in these forest the consequences to the Denver Metro water supply could be substantial.

Bark beetles are changing the look and feel of Colorado’s forests and everyone will have to learn to adapt to beetle impacted forests. Land management agencies are not only developing plans to respond to the current outbreak but also creating long-term plans that will help to establish healthy future forests for Coloradoans to enjoy.