Aspen mobilizing community to combat ‘zombie forest’ on Ajax

Kairos Futura and Aspen Center for Environmental Studies are partnering to mobilize the local community in order to save Douglas-fir trees on Aspen Mountain by mitigating for bark beetle outbreaks.

The event will spread volunteers out across the backside of Ajax beginning at 11 a.m. May 30, with a party after from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. with food, drinks and prizes.

The aim of the event is to treat 5,000 trees with pheromone patches that send a chemical signal to bark beetles that the trees are already occupied in order to protect them. While bark beetles are a native species that have evolved right along with Aspen’s native tree species, according to Forest and Climate Director for ACES Adam McCurdy, climate change has created conditions that have enabled bark beetle outbreaks to occur on a scale that has not been seen previously.

“As a consequence of human actions, their activity has gotten out of scale from what we’ve seen historically,” McCurdy said. “With that, we are looking at areas where we can try and help bring things back within the range of historic alignment … The hope is that people are able to walk away from this with a better sense of what the impacts are on our local landscape and how climate is impacting us and feel they have some agency and some ability to influence this.”

According to McCurdy, placing pheromone patches on trees in an area — that don’t necessarily even have to be Douglas-firs — is effective due to pheromones being the primary way that bark beetles communicate with each other. When a bark beetle gets to a tree, it releases aggregation pheromones that attract other beetles to swarm the bark, so they are able to overwhelm the tree’s defenses together. Once the tree is full of beetles, they release anti-aggregation pheromones to let other beetles know there’s no more room.

What the upcoming event will do is place anti-aggregation pheromones in a grid on the backside of Aspen Mountain to prevent beetles from finding an available host tree.

“The goal is not a forever project,” McCurdy said. “The goal is to help get the trees past the outbreak stage.”

The event will also tie in an imaginative element, inviting participants to combat the infestation as part of a larger mission against “zombie trees.”

“The beetles kill silently,” a press release for the event reads. “They bore into bark, sever a tree’s water supply, and leave it standing, still green, but dead.”

As volunteers are assigned sectors of the mountain to place pheromone patches, they will also be participating in a scavenger hunt for Forest Relics, objects made by Kairos artists and hidden throughout the landscape. Each team will be able to get points based on finding treasure items and patching a sector of the forest. Everyone who completes the mission will be initiated into the First Forest Division, Kairos Futura’s growing team of ecological field volunteers, and receive a divisional badge hat.

“I’ve been interested for a long time in how do we get people to want to engage with tough issues — challenging things that are easier to ignore or just compartmentalize than they are to actually try to manage or look at or deal with because they feel too big to handle,” said artist and activist Ajax Axe, who founded Kairos Futura. “If you can get people to have an emotional hook or feeling of curiosity, wonder, awe, playfulness, and then they start engaging with more intellectual material around a topic, we’ve found it’s a very effective way to mobilize communities to work on those tough issues.”

Axe has lived and worked on the backside of Aspen Mountain for years, where she’s been able to witness firsthand the impact of climate-induced beetle outbreaks on local ecology.

“I saw that something was starting to happen that I’d never seen happen before,” Axe said. “That’s why I got interested in this. At a community level, it’s pretty devastating to see the forest in this weakened state.”

Douglas-firs are one of Aspen’s native trees and a particularly drought-resilient species, according to McCurdy, making them “valuable” to the future of Aspen’s landscape as drought persists. Bark beetles target mature trees, meaning the trees that are seed-producing. While younger trees are left behind, he said it could take up to 20+ years for those younger trees to reach seed-producing maturity.

The work being done to address the bark beetle outbreaks has been occurring in collaboration with a number of different local organizations on the front side of Aspen Mountain since 2022, with results already showing a downward trend in beetle activity as a result of treatments.

“Bark beetles, if left unchecked, can spread and kill large areas of the area’s stands of Douglas-fir trees,” Aspen’s website reads. “When beetle populations reach epidemic levels, they begin to attack healthier trees and can alter the forest ecosystem … During the summer of 2021 the City of Aspen, Pitkin County, Aspen Fire, Aspen Skiing Company, ACES, AVLT and USFS formed a group to address the spread of Douglas-fir bark beetles on the Shadow Mountain and Ute areas of Aspen Mountain. Each summer since 2022, the group has completed mitigation projects on over 150 acres of forest hanging pheromone packets and tracking beetle populations in the area.” 

The group will be continuing pheromone treatments on the front side of the mountain this summer. The upcoming volunteer event will be the first time that the treatment is implemented on the backside of Ajax, and the first time volunteers will be part of this work.

“There is so much that can be done,” Axe said. “We don’t have that much power individually, but collectively, we have a tremendous amount of power. This group mobilization on climate resilience issues actually can have an impact.”

Registration is free but required, as slots for the Zombie Forest Quest are capped at 100. Register at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/first-forest-division-zombie-forest-quest-tickets-1984036730269.