The rest of the story...

The story of how mountain pine beetles have taken over lodgepole forests of the Northwest is both complicated and convoluted.

Gifford Pinchot, Father of the Forest Service, helped set the stage for the eruption of the beetles that are killing pine in the Three Sisters Wilderness today. He had zero tolerance for fire in the forest, for any reason, and just about every forester from that day on preached the same sermon: "No fire in the forest!"

Smokey Bear picked up the torch and carried it into all sectors of forest management. Ask any child in school about what Smokey says, and they will tell you, "Fire is bad!"

Without fire to help thin young lodgepoles crowding their neighbors, there would never be enough water and nutrients for a healthy forest capable of withstanding the onslaught of bark beetles.

Lodgepole were planted by the thousands in the 1960s, in the Fort Rock District, to replace ponderosa pine that were hauled to the mills in Bend - and the mountain pine beetles thought they'd died and gone to heaven.

Dry winters and drier summers, such as in the late 1970s made things tough for the young trees growing in Northwest forests. They competed with each other for water and nutrients, some died, but most went into stress - and mountain pine bark beetles moved right in.

To make a bad situation worse, in the '50s and '60s someone got the bright idea to harvest as many snags from the Deschutes National Forest as possible. By the mid-'60s ponderosa pine, Doug fir and lodgepole pine snags were hauled out of the forest by the tens of thousands.

Where the railroad crosses Reed Market Road in Bend you could see thousands of snags at a siding where they were loaded on flat cars and hauled to mills all over the Northwest.

Brooks-Scanlon, the largest lumber mill in Bend at the time, marketed the material from snags as "Brook's Wood." It had no structural strength, but was sawed into rough boards and used as paneling.

Marvin Russell operated a mill in La Pine and sawed up snags by the thousands, making them into finished lumber for beautiful cabinets and other furniture. He said, with pride, "We're cleaning up the forest of all that dead wood and fire danger by cutting snags."

However, as it turned out, removing snags from a forest ecosystem was not helping anything but mountain pine beetles and other destructive insects that like to eat trees.

Snags are the substrate that woodpeckers need to build their homes. Once the nesting cavity has been made, and the woodpeckers have raised their brood, the adults usually hammer out another home the next nesting season.

Woodpecker cavities rarely go unoccupied for very long. Usually "gleaners," such as nuthatches, chickadees, wrens and such, move in and set up housekeeping, and it's those LBJs that are doom and gloom for bark beetles. From dawn to dark gleaners never stop grooming trees of pestiferous insects.

It was not until the '80s that forest managers and ecologists began to recognize snags as irreplaceable components of a healthy forest ecosystem. Throughout the Northwest, contracts were let out to girdle, blow up, top and otherwise kill trees so they would become snags and provide nesting habitat for woodpeckers and gleaners.

Fire also came into play as a management tool. In the Sisters area fire eliminated thousands of white fir that were competing for water and nutrients with pine and other "desirable" species. Fire was, and still is, used to prevent catastrophic wild fires.

However, it was too late to stop the mountain pine beetle. By the '90s millions of trees in public and private forests had been killed by these tiny creatures, and they're still spreading. A few wild fires slowed them down here and there, and in the '90s, one place stopped them in their tracks: Sunriver.

Sunriver is forested by almost 100 percent lodgepole pine. If the pine beetles had been allowed to get into the trees around the homes and roads it would have been a disaster. Dave Danley, who was then director of the Sunriver Nature Center, designed a plan to thin the stands of lodgepole. Thinning allowed the trees to better utilize moisture and nutrients and put on a burst of health and vigor. Beetles that tried to get into the trees were literally "pitched out."