North to South - the Arizona Trail

Trail

From Utah to Mexico, the rugged trek will someday total about 800 wild miles Text by LAWRENCE W. CHEEK Photographs by RANDY PRENTICE Maps by MIKE REAGAN

Normally

I love staring into Arizona from an airline seat, savoring the mosaic of improbable colors, the spiderleg tracks of canyons, the mountain ridgelines that slice the sky like the serrations of an ancient stone knife. I see the fierce angularity of the land as a challenge to humanity's relentless press to tame and settle and pave it, which in an increasingly crowded world seems immeasurably precious. We need places that resist us.

But this time, 35,000 feet over the Kaibab Plateau, I'm looking out the window with a knot of fear tightening in my throat. I have concocted a scheme to hike some 260 miles of the Arizona Trail, a not-quite-completed footpath from Utah to Mexico that comprises serious wilderness and an overabundance of that angularity. I'm spectacularly unqualified for this, aside from knowing Arizona fairly well and carrying not too much middle-age flab. I bought a backpack two weeks ago, pecked my first tentative waypoints into a global positioning system (GPS) gadget just five days past. I hate sleeping in a tent because everything that crunches a twig out there startles me awake. I've never done anything nearly as challenging as this.

So why try it? I moved away from Arizona eight years ago, with regrets, and this promised a powerful way to resume a relationship with a landscape I still love. I wanted to get out of my office. I needed to confront an army of my fears and tell them what they could do with themselves, rather than the other way around.

For reading matter, I've brought — what else? - Edward Abbey's classic Desert Solitaire, which helps explain my own mission to me. Landscapes like these, Abbey wrote, have the power “to startle the senses and surprise the mind out of their ruts of habit, to compel us into a reawakened awareness of the wonderful.” If we live to enjoy reawakening.

Dale Shewalter, a Flagstaff 6th-grade teacher, hatched the idea of the Arizona Trail in 1985. Pondering an Arizona map, he discerned a patchy north-south green corridor, signifying mostly mountainous national forests, so he decided to try hiking south to north, Nogales to Fredonia, using available trails and two-lane roads. “Unfortunately, it was July and pretty steamy,” he told me. “It became more of an endurance test than a wilderness walk. I did 540 miles, living on peanuts and raisins.” Shewalter is an old-fashioned, no-nonsense outdoors guy; he hikes in jeans and cowboy shirts and has not been known to backpack with prissy titanium cookware. But he has a degree in physical geography and talks about the critical need to grow a community of people who understand, cherish and care for the land. That in mind, he took a year's leave from teaching in 1988 and traveled the state, talking to hiking clubs and Forest Service officials. Six years later the nonprofit Arizona Trail Association incorporated and began carving new trails to link up with existing ones.

“We're down to the last 100 miles,” Larry Snead, the ATA's executive director, told me over a breakfast of Mexican food. He's reluctant to guess when the 800plus miles will be linked — “not many years” is all he'll offer — but a few ambitious hikers already have made the border-to-border trek, bushwhacking where necessary.

Only a few. Snead said he knows of maybe 10 who have throughhiked it in one continuous push; about 25 have gone the distance in segments of a few days at a time. The trail is tough, frequently a vertical zigzag, plunging into canyons and lurching over mountains.

Even more daunting is its aridity. There are segments 10, 20, even 30 miles long where water is a fat chance. Weather is a caprice. Terry Gay, an experienced Tucson backpacker, started a through-hike in the spring of 2003. She lost the trail in snow in the Huachuca Mountains just north of the Mexican border, then fell sick from heat in the desert north of Tucson.

“I overestimated my ability,” she told me. “The trail is a good teacher.” She's now hiking it in segments, and not unhappily.

Shewalter confirmed that the Arizona Trail is plenty challenging, even for veterans. “But you make your challenges into opportunities,” he said. “It'll make or break your character.”breaks on the first day.

My character

The second week of October normally delivers ideal hiking weather in Arizona's midlevel elevations. But 2003 is no normal year. Phoenix will equal or break 57 daily heat records by year's end, and today will be one of those record-breakers. We're a long way from Phoenix, starting our hike in high desert at 5,000 feet on the Utah border, but even here today's forecast high is 90.

I have a couple of companions for this leg: photographer Randy Prentice, who appears much more rugged than I but is just as leery of major backpacking, and Howard Greene, a friend from Taos, who looks more del-icate than either of us but who has mountain-goat abilities and can read topo maps.

While planning this adventure, I read A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson's won-derfully entertaining and useful book about his fumbling efforts to hike the Appalachian Trail. Bryson selected a hiking buddy who knew absolutely nothing about the outdoors and resembled Orson Welles “after a very bad night.” He provided a fine comic foil for the narrative but hardly enhanced Bryson's chances of survival. Of the friends I drafted for assorted segments of the Arizona Trail, three were veteran backpackers and the fourth was an engineer who could, in a pinch, build a satellite phone out of twigs and pebbles. So my anxieties begin to dissipate, at least regarding the haz-ards I've projected. Navigation proves easy - Arizona Trail

Association volunteers have pounded stakes bearing “Arizona Trail” logos at every point where a doofus might wander off. The Yellow Brick Road couldn't be easier to follow. Still, it's a tough day's stroll, even for Howard: 11 miles and a 1,500-foot climb with 35-pound packs onto the Kaibab Plateau, where we're meeting Randy for first night's camp. Groaning with camera gear, he's driven his camper truck to a Forest Road rendezvous with the trail.

After a camp dinner of chile-laced noodles and landjager sausage (my one contribution to this party may be that I can cook), Howard offers a radical idea: “You know, using the camper as a base, we could do most of this as day hikes. .” I consider this suggestion eminently sensible, and not one at odds with the Arizona Trail's spirit. This trail is intended for a galaxy of users - trail runners, mountain bikers, snowshoers, equestrians, casual day-hikers and fanatic through-hikers. “Revised itinerary coming tomorrow,” I say.

The point of hiking, I think, is not to push to the edge of exhaustion and injury, but to remain sufficiently alive to be open to whatever beauty or instruction the land has to offer. I'm out here to have my senses engaged and sharpened, not degraded and dulled by fatigue, and to leave behind the pressures of my everyday work and home life.

Terry Gay was right; the Arizona Trail teaches-and its first-day lesson was that I hadn't designed an expedition to elude those pressures, just one that imposed different onesa forced march, 12 to 15 miles daily with full packs. Fun for fitness fanatics, maybe, but not the reason I've come here. In the morning I scribble out a kinder, gentler itinerary, and Howard and I plod off across the Kaibab Plateau with 10-pound daypacks.

It's impossible to top John Wesley Powell's

thoughts about traversing the Grand Canyon. Years after his 1869 expedition through the “Grand Cañon of the Colorado,” he wrote: “The traveler on the brink looks from afar and is overwhelmed with the sublimity of massive forms; the traveler among the gorges stands in the presence of awful mysteries, profound, solemn, and gloomy.”

But also this:

“It is a region more difficult to traverse than the Alps or the Himalayas, but if strength and courage are sufficient for the task, by a year's toil a concept of sublimity can be obtained never again to be equaled on the hither side of Paradise.” I've day-hiked into the Grand Canyon-dipping in a toe, so to speak-several times, but this will be my first Rim-toRim. It's the grandest obstacle on the Arizona Trail, in more ways than one.

Arizona Trail trekkers can't simply saunter up to the lip of the Canyon and continue through-not unless they're prepared to commit the entire 25-mile hike in one day. To control congestion and prevent overuse of the Canyon's main corridor, the Park Service has a permit system for camping, and confounding as it may be, they're getting 30,000 applications a year. They issue 13,000 permits, which annually allows about 40,000 overnight campers.

Our application, faxed in weeks ago, didn't make the cut, so we shift to Plan B. We arrive at the North Rim's backcountry office, a trailer nested beneath a towering skyline of ponderosas and golden aspens, at 8 A.M. on a chilly Sunday to apply for slots opened by cancellations. A cheerful ranger boots his computer, checks some bewildering schedules, and tells us to return tomorrow when, he assures us, we can pick up a permit.

We pass Sunday night in relative luxury at the North Rim's Grand Canyon Lodge, where I converse with a couple from St. Louis who tell me I'd not make a cheerful, helpful ranger. “We're here just for tonight at the Grand Canyon, and we're hitting Zion National Park tomorrow,” the woman says. “Can we see Zion in two hours?”

“You're kidding. Stay two days, at least.”

“We can't. We have reservations in Vegas tomorrow night.” “Forget 'em. Life's short. Spend your time here and at Zion.”

“Oh, no-we'd lose our deposit!”

Morning dawns with perfect hiking weather, at least at the North Rim's 8,000 feet. As we start down the North Kaibab Trail, my jacket is stashed and my pack is slimmed to a minimalist 25 pounds. We're not schlepping tents since there's no rain forecast. A helpful ranger suggested this and guaranteed we'll thank him for the absent weight during our 4,300-foot grind up the Bright Angel Trail to the South Rim. (Memo to ranger: Thank you!) Before North Kaibab, we'd encountered exactly one other

hiker in four days on the Arizona Trail. Now we're three molecules in a river of humanity - the Park Service estimates 50,000 people walk or run Rim-to-Rim annually. Despite signs warning how tough it is, many try it without camping overnight. I ask one of the speedsters why. "Why climb Mount Everest?" he replies, his expression adding, What a lame question. I know there's more to the answer. Natural spectacles such as the Grand Canyon or Everest trigger a powerful lust within the human heart to cut them down to size and negotiate them on our terms. Young bodies, crazed with hormones and blessed with muscle tone, race across the Canyon. When we grow older, we design dams to plug the Colorado and make lakes in the desert. Either way, we learn much about our own abilities but little about the land.

We slither into our sleeping bags at Cottonwood Camp after 10 miles and one of those dismal pour-boiling-water-in-the-pouch "lasagna" dinners. It's only 8 P.M., so I just lie awake and stare at the sky. A gibbous moon rises, bright and brittle as a light in a cell that the guard won't turn off. The Canyon's serrated walls, faintly lit against the sky, are propped around us like sepia photographs of ruined battlements. The serenity is complete and perfect; I feel more secure than I would in my bed back in quake-happy Seattle.

At 10 P.M. a terrific wind blows out of nowhere, threatening to crack cottonwood branches 75 feet directly over my head. It's the Canyon "breathing," exchanging warm air on its floor with cold on the Kaibab. It howls till midnight, then quits as abruptly as it started. That security was an illusion, an interlude. The Canyon is a living entity, always changing, sometimes cataclysmically-floods, rockfalls, storms. NaturalistCraig Childs, a frequent contributor to Arizona Highways, wrote perfectly: "The word 'canyon' is as close to a verb as any landform can be."

Our ascent up Bright Angel Trail is as tough as advertised, but the physical effort teaches me more about the Canyon. Standing on the Rim and staring into and across it, a "concept of sublimity" doesn't fully jell because its scale and architecture lie outside human experience. Hiking the Canyon gives it an opportunity to rough you up, so you begin to know it-personally and respectfully.

I call home from the South Rim to report our accomplishment. Patty, my wife, says she has just talked to a friend who thought I was hiking the Appalachian Trail. When she corrected him, he sounded disappointed.

"Arizona," he said. "That's mostly flat, isn't it?"

The Arizona Trail

traverses just one urban area, the piney metropolis of Flagstaff, which provides us with a nutritious refueling bazaar encompassing all four basic food groups: hamburgers, hot dogs, tacos and pizza. A few miles south of the city, the trail resumes its teaching of lessons.

I've planned a two-day, 21-mile hike from Walnut Canyon National Monument to the north end of dry Mormon Lake. Joining me is a long-time friend from Tucson, Ed Stiles. Ed lives and breathes hiking; he fabricates his own ultralight tents and backpacks, and he's legendary in Tucson for snipping the paper flags off tea bags to save weight.

We shuttle one car to Mormon Lake, then drive back via Lake Mary Road, stopping to hide 2 gallons (Text continued on page 26)

(Continued from page 23) of water under a juniper. When we reach the trailhead at Walnut Canyon, a sign blandly informs us that we'll have 15 miles to hike to our cache.

"Fifteen miles is beyond my range," Ed declares.

"I eyeballed it on the map," I say. "It looks like only 9 or 10."

We spread the map on the ground and scale the route with a string: 15 miles.

So we wheel back to Mormon Lake to retrieve Ed's car, re-park it where our water cache had been, then get lost in a labyrinth of back roads trying to cache water at an 8-mile stop. We burst out, inadvertently, back at the Walnut Canyon trailhead. It's noon, a bit past our intended 8 A.M. departure.

Lacking words fully appropriate to the occasion, I tell Ed, "I'm sorry."

He's beyond gracious. "This is how my backpacking trips usually beginhalf a day after they're supposed to. There's always something. The basic fact about backpacking is that you can't control a lot-the weather, the environment, forest regulations, what the trails may throw at you." He doesn't underscore the obvious: that I could have averted this ridiculous morning by measuring the trail.

We end up carrying 2 gallons of water apiece. The trek finally turns into fun near the end of the first day, after we've cycled 5 or 6 pounds of the water through our systems. On the second day, emerging from the mouth of Walnut Canyon, we discover a lovely pink and black escarpment of Coconino sandstone, furrowed and wind-sculpted in rhythmic waves. It's not quite a spectacle to rival the Grand Canyon, but discovering it is like knowing a secret place.

We're collecting a horde of them.

Snead, ATA's executive director, meets me in Superior and we rumble into the Pinal County outback for an introduction to some little-known segments.

Whitford Canyon, a few miles north of Superior, deserves to be better known. Without fanfare, the trail descends into a broad but shallow Sonoran Desert canyon that encloses a different, self-contained biological world at every turn. We walk through a saguaro forest, a cholla forest, a mesquite forest, a cottonwood forest, and finally a forest of sunflowers. Entirely absent is the puckered, parsimonious landscape sometimes associated with the word desert.

Snead examines a ruined cairn. "We used to think cows brushed against them and knocked them over. Now we know it's bears. Ants and other insects will get under the rocks, and the bears will tear up the cairns to get them." A desert that supports bears!

The next morning, Snead deposits Randy and me at Tiger Mine Road near Oracle with a promise to pick us up 6 miles north where the trail crosses Tucson Wash. I wonder why he's not hiking with us. It's soon obvious. The trail undu-lates, rolling pointlessly into arroyos and over hills, offeringfew scenic dividends for the effort. It's a segment only a desertrat could love.

Take that literally. Under a sprawling mesquite, Randy andI notice a scattering of spiky cholla stems surrounding a hole.We're mystified: It's impossible that they scooted there ontheir own. Later, a wildlife biologist explains it to me: a pack-rat arranged them to protect its den from marauding coyotesand bobcats. A barbed-wire fence, engineered by a rodent.

This is the argument for shunning a wheeled cage andinstead plodding across the world at 2 miles per hour, remaining receptive to nature's small miracles even-no, especially where you least expect them.

Three weeks into the expedition, one ofthe surprises has been how few humans we've seen. Exceptfor the Grand Canyon, and our occasional forays into civilization for showers and fine food, we've encountered maybetwo dozen people on foot or bicycle. Most of those were inthe Superstitions, a convenient weekend escape for urbanrefugees from Phoenix. We've seen almost no trailside litterand have sometimes plodded for miles at a time without any sign of human impact on the land-except for those welcome markers assuring us we're still on the Arizona Trail.Lonesome miles like those tend to reinforce, erroneously,the overriding myth of the AmericanWest that continues to endure eventoday: that this undeveloped land is sovast and its resources so prodigious thatneither can ever be exhausted.

In a lovely, seemingly pristine valleyon the Kaibab Plateau, Howard and Iwere enjoying lunch when a hunter put-tered by on an all-terrain vehicle, a rifleslung over his arm. He circled an ever-green copse at a lawn-mowing pace for 10 minutes, countingon the machine's rasp to flush a deer or elk. None appeared, buthis motorized hunting, the ability to pursue prey through theirown habitat at high speeds, struck me as a metaphor for howtechnology has overtaken the West's capacity to resist us.

Human effort, multiplied many times by machines, is gobbling available land at a voracious pace. In 1995 The ArizonaRepublic calculated that metro Phoenix was expanding intothe desert at the rate of an acre an hour, a pace that has notsince slackened. I calculate that at this rate it will take Phoenix8,328 years to engulf the state, but the big number is smallcomfort. We persist in believing that there's enough land for everybody and every kind of use. We blindly follow our biological disposition, multiplying our numbers and claiming more and more of the planet's habitat, while denying our most amazing and precious gift: We are the one animal on the planet with the capacity to reason, to predict its own future and alter it if we choose.

The Arizona Trail boldly attacks the north flank of the Santa Catalina Mountains, Tucson's signature range, arcing up Oracle Ridge and over the summit of 9,157-foot Mount Lemmon. We'd hoped to hike this entire segment-it's Randy's and my hometown hill, and a sentimental favorite-but the disastrous 2003 Aspen Fire has closed chunks of it. Still, we can hike several miles through a burn zone on Oracle Ridge, which proves to be disturbingly enchanting.

The coal-black skeletons of white oak and emory oak trees jut into the sky like upturned spider legs, eerily sinister but also lovely in stark contrast to a sapphire sky and the colorful new growth sprouting around them. Larry Snead tells me he likewise found it strangely beautiful the first time he hiked through here after the fire. "Here was all this devastation, and I thought it was pretty. I felt guilty," he confesses.

Dean Prichard, a retired journalist, has lived here in the historic Buffalo Bill Cody ranch house for 30 years beside what is now the Arizona Trail. I ask him about his feelings when he rides his horse through the burn. "It's not my land, but I've always felt like I was a part of it," he says. "I feel a bit lost, a bit betrayed."

Betrayed by whom? Fire is a natural and essential part ofnature's forestry, but our urban encroachment and forest management has multiplied its ravages. The Aspen Fire torched 84,000 acres, a number that means something only after I convert it to square miles: 131, an area four-fifths the size of incorporated Tucson. Most of the devastation near Prichard's place was caused by backfires set to protect human habitat on the mountain.

Oracle Ridge is the most instructive place on the Arizona Trail to see how substantially our species has transformed the landscape. Looking down from the rocky aerie, we see an openpit mine, a smelter, dirt roads (and this hiking trail) scraped into the foothills, a red tide of suburban tile roofs, the diamondlike dome of Biosphere II and everywhere around us the blackened forest.

How do we preserve authentic wilderness at the back door of a city of nearly a million people? How do we convince a furiously growing population that it's worth doing, that it must be done if civilization is to have any collective memory of the Earth's natural beauty and nature's endangered balance?

We had planned to backpack 21 miles across the Huachuca Mountains to trail's end at the Mexican border, but Steve Saway, the Arizona Trail Association's volunteer steward for the southernmost segment, advises against it. "There's a lot of illegal (alien) traffic up there," (Text continued on page 33)

PLANNING AN ARIZONA TRAIL HIKE An Arizona Trail adventure

It demands planning and deserves precautions. If you're a beginning backpacker, there are plenty of books stuffed with critical and useful information (for example, if you change nothing else daily, change your socks - prevents blisters). Most comprehensive: The Complete Walker IV by Colin Fletcher and Chip Rawlins (Knopf 2003, $22.95).

You can explore much of the trail on day hikes, although many of the forest roads that access the trail demand high-clearance four-wheel-drive vehicles. Check conditions with the Forest Service.

volunteer trail stewards all know their designated segments and will happily provide information by phone or e-mail. For segments in National Forests, the nearest Forest Service ranger district office also will be helpful. Finally, check out ATA member Dave Hicks' comprehensive online "book" on the Arizona Trail (www.geocities. com/davehicks01/).

Maps have been a problem for trail hikers since many existing hiking maps don't show new segments of the trail or designate it as the Arizona Trail. But volunteers have now surveyed more than 550 miles of the trail with GPS receivers, and precise maps are available from the Arizona Public Land Information Center in Phoenix, (602) 4179300 or www.publiclands.org.

Adding water weight, 8.2 pounds per gallon, include caching it in advance where Forest Service roads cross the trail or having a reliable friend meet you.

Inquiries on weekdays between 1 P.M. and 5 P.M., or you can hear recorded information at (928) 638-7888. If your permit is denied, go to the backcountry office at 8 A.M. on the day you hope to hike and apply in person. A ranger said he's never seen anyone have to wait more than "one or two days."

The trek across the Grand Canyon is the most heavily trod piece of the Arizona Trail and ironically the most difficult to plan for. You'll need either to make reservations years in advance at Phantom Ranch, (888) 297-2757, or get an overnight backcountry permit for a National Park campground in the Canyon both are challenging to arrange. Apply for the backcountry permit on the first day of the month four months ahead of the date you want. The National Park Web site, www.nps.gov/grca/backcountry/, has complete information on the permit system and answers to most questions about camping safely in the Canyon. The Backcountry Information Center, (928) 638-7875, answers phone>> The Arizona Trail generally shuns civilization, but why should you? A hot shower in a motel and a real meal in a restaurant every two or three days makes backpacking more enjoyable for the majority of us. Most convenient overnight stops on or near the trail include Jacob Lake, Grand Canyon North and South rims, Flagstaff, Pine, Superior, Oracle and Patagonia.

Water is the most critical issue on most segments. The essential amount of water a hiker needs will vary with the seasons. Alternatives to carrying all the

Other advice:

Learn everything you can about each trail segment before venturing out, particularly its elevation profile, trail condition, signage and current water availability. The Arizona Trail Association's website is the starting place (www.aztrail.org). The ATA's A GPS receiver is a useful navigational device on an Arizona Trail hike. A cell phone might be useful for throwing at a pesky raccoon.

An essential part of the complex ecosystem of

In Southwestern forests, bark beetles are so tiny you almost would not know they are there - that is unless you look for traces of them. Yet this unassuming tree dweller has wielded considerable clout over the last couple of years, worrying foresters, inspiring statewide experts to team up on an investigative task force and changing the state's landscape one tree at a time.

The diminutive creatures occur naturally in Arizona's pine, juniper and cypress habitats. Measuring only 3 to 6 millimeters in length, bark beetles play an important role in forest ecosystems-infesting and killing stressed or weakened trees and effectively providing an abundance of homes for animals and birds that inhabit snags. But the beetles also can create havoc, adding to the forest fire risk and displacing other wildlife depen-dent on verdant woodlands.

Through a combination of extended drought conditions and overcrowded forests, the state now faces what's considered the worst epidemic of bark-beetle infestation docu-mented in Arizona.

Tom DeGomez, a forest health specialist with the University of Arizona and the Arizona Bark Beetle Task Force, Pine bark beetles are naturally attracted to stressed or weakened pine trees, which emit terpenes-oils that are easily detected by the insects. When a bee-tle locates a suitable host for colonization, it emits a pheromone to attract other beetles to the tree. The adult beetles bore through the tough outer bark, tunnel into the soft inner bark and then lay eggs. After a week, the eggs hatch and the larvae feed on the inner bark, girdling the tree with a crazy maze of tunnels and cutting off the tree's flow of nutrients.

The beetles also contribute to the demise of the tree by introducing a blue stain fun-gus that prevents the flow of water from the roots up to the top of the tree. Six to eight weeks after hatching, the larvae pupate and then emerge, boring out of the tree and flying up to 2 miles in a quest to find a new host for the next cycle. With three to four generations in one year, the bark beetle population can quickly become unmanageable. "It's an exponential type of growth," said DeGomez.

In a balanced forest ecosystem, healthy pine trees repel bark beetle attacks by pushing out the invasive insects with sap. The overcrowding of the pines, all competing for water that isn't available due to the extended drought, contribute to conditions that create a prime habitat for the bark beetles. According to the Journal of Forestry, the forest that existed prior to European settlement looked much different than it does today. Cycles of drought and natural fires kept them open. Logging, fire suppression and livestock grazing are just a few of the factors that changed the fundamental nature of Arizona's ponderosa pine forest.

beetles friend or foe? They destroy weakened, water-stressed trees, but there may be positive benefits by Carrie M. Miner

says the current problem first manifested in 2001. However, it wasn't until 2002 that the infestations drew serious concern - especially in the hardest hit areas below the Mogollon Rim on Apache tribal lands and around the cities of Pine, Strawberry, Prescott and Crown King.Aerial surveys revealed a disturbing view. The bark beetles' 2002 season left behind more than 2 million dead trees on 617,000 acres. Seemingly content with their havoc and destruction, the season's last adult generation of bark beetles settled down to hibernate until April, when they started their destruction all over again. Forest Service officials are waging a war with the beetles in the state's scenic recreational areas so they don't mar the view.

At the turn of the 20th century, there were only 20 pines per acre, compared to the hundreds per acre found in the ponderosa pine forest a century later.

There are 17 species of native bark beetles at work in Arizona's forests. The principal players in the outbreak are two types of Dendroctonus, which primarily attack the lower bole or trunk of large trees, and three types of Ips, which generally attack small trees or the crowns of large trees. These pine bark beetles don't discriminate and are happy to attack ponderosa pines, Chihuahua pines, Apache pines, piñon pines, limber pines, bristlecone pines or single-leaf pines. However, there have also been serious bark beetle outbreaks in stands of native cypress and juniper trees.In 2003, the impact of the bark beetle infestation hit with even greater force than the previous year - a tenfold increase in tree mortality from 2 million to 20 million trees on more than 875,000 acres. Even though many of those trees counted in the 2003 survey may be casualties that hadn't shown visual evidence of infestation during the survey in July, August and September 2002, the numbers are staggering.Despite the dramatic surge of bark beetles and tree mortality, foresters are optimistic about the long-term effects of the outbreak on future forest growth.

"This could be a very healthy event," said DeGomez, pointing out a possible bright side of the bark beetle battle.These insects accomplish the impossible in the forests: They thin the woods. With more open forests, experts say the ponderosa pine density will be more like what existed prior to settlement, and although the forests will no longer look as they did during the 20th century, in the future they will be more fireand drought-resistant. All