The voracious pine beetle’s renewed assault on Colorado forests expanded rapidly in 2025, chewing through nearly 150% more Front Range ponderosa pine than the year before, according to a new state forester’s report.
The state’s urban canopy is also being nibbled to death — by the emerald ash borer. The ambitious invader showed up in six new cities in 2025 after years of warnings from local arborists about the spreading threat.
Ash, which make up as much as 15% of city trees in many areas, are being eaten up in Aurora, Berthoud, Denver, Edgewater, Golden and Wheat Ridge in addition to previous affected sites. The ash borer was first discovered in Colorado in Boulder in 2013, and is now in at least 20 cities.
The ash-favoring beetle will likely spread south to Castle Rock and Colorado Springs in the next few years, said Mary Brand Danser, urban and community forestry program specialist with the Colorado State Forest Service. “But in reality, we’re only one piece of infected firewood away from emerald ash borer spreading anywhere in the state,” Danser said.
The pine beetle spread through ponderosa, after devastating Colorado’s lodgepole forests in the early 2000s and 2010s, is relentless and will soon become exponential, State Forester Matt McCombs warned.
One goal of the brutal deforestation updates, McCombs said, is “getting communities prepared, not just for the practical considerations, but really the emotional and psychological impacts of seeing a forest in transition. Getting folks ready for what they’ll see over time.”
That map of pending ponderosa devastation, shared when Gov. Jared Polis formed a statewide task force on the ponderosa threat, shows widespread loss of the Front Range ponderosa-dominated forests over the next two decades. There simply aren’t enough resources, even with promising cooperation among local, state and federal forest and wildfire interests, McCombs said, to save a significant portion of ponderosa.
Some landmark stands can be saved by public intervention, and individual property owners can work to save highly visible trees around their dwellings or buildings. There are pesticide injections that can ward off the pine beetle, and the state is employing another chemical that can fool nearby pine beetles into thinking a ponderosa has already been infested and thereby protect it, McCombs said.
“They are not cost effective so they are constrained at scale,” McCombs said. “But you can get everyone to do what they can, from a quarter-acre to 100 acres.”
Matt McCombs, Colorado State Forester, walks among Ponderosa pine trees, many of them dead or dying from pine beetle infestation on February 19, 2026 in Idaho Springs, Colorado. (Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)More of the state’s work will be identifying increased wildfire dangers as ponderosa in counties where homes mingle with wildlands die in place and add to potentially explosive fuels. That overload of dead trunk and limb fuel from the lodgepole infestation contributed to the destructive force of the 2020 East Troublesome and Cameron Peak fires, McCombs noted.
“We know we’re not going to be able to engage with every acre. Where we can make the biggest impact, we gotta get going,” McCombs said. “It’s not going to be easy, but it’s also absolutely necessary that we continue to come together locally, at the state, and federally, to get Coloradans and Colorado landscapes moving in the right direction and staying engaged until these systems can start to recover.”
The same is true for urban ash trees and the ash borer, McCombs said. There are too many ash in Colorado’s urban canopy to save every one, but cities and homeowners can choose where to make the extra effort to save favorite trees.
Once Coloradans start accepting the emotional factors, with their favorite landscapes turning brown and gray at a wholesale level, as they did in the lodgepole beetle era, McCombs said, then they can move on to see opportunities. The task force members and other parties are creating plans for a much healthier and more resilient patchwork of Colorado forests in the wake of lodgepole and ponderosa losses, he said. With enough work over the coming decades, Colorado’s tree stands will have a lot more variety in both species and age.
The CSU update for 2025 forest health shows pine beetles impacting 5,444 acres in a nine-county Front Range area, up 148% from the 2,236 acres in the same counties in 2024.
The emerald ash borer has been spreading as predicted up and down Front Range suburban and urban communities, despite state and local warnings to not transport firewood or downed limbs between communities. The ash killer jumped across the Continental Divide to Carbondale in 2013, and is likely to be in Colorado Springs within five years, the state report said.
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