Aspen Community Stakes Pheromone Packets to Fight Bark Beetle

Have you ever stood on the backside of Aspen Mountain and watched the forest turn into a bruised, iridescent nightmare, wondering if the silence you hear is just the wind, or the sound of a ecosystem holding its breath?

That’s the question haunting the Roaring Fork Valley right now. The trees are warping in front of our eyes. First, the needles turn a dull, sickly yellow. Then, they flare into an iridescent red flame that looks less like autumn and more like a warning signal. Finally, they collapse into that signature hollow gray — the death knell of the Douglas-fir.

It’s the bark beetle. And it’s killing our forest.

If left unchecked, this tiny architect of destruction throws the whole ecosystem out of whack. But on Saturday, a group of neighbors, artists, and futurists gathered to fight back. They called it Zombie Forest Quest, a name that feels both fitting and haunting, because the dying trees do look zombified. They stand as opaque purple ghosts against the skyline, stripped of life but still standing, a sinister rainbow gradient that reminds us daily of our imbalance.

I signed up for the quest because I love trees. I’ve written a book about them, after all. They are a sophisticated technology, essential to making our air breathable and our planet livable. When the forest changes, it ripples out to change all of us. So, I turned up to the event led by Kairos Futura, founded by artist and futurist Ajax Phillips and the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies (ACES).

The mission was simple in theory, complex in execution: place thousands of pheromone packets on the trees to protect swaths of the forest from beetle kill.

Adam McCurdy, the Forest and Climate Director for ACES, explained the science as we stood among the pines. To prevent beetles from boring holes and depositing a lethal fungus, we needed to trick them. We needed to tell the beetles the tree was “full.” The scent came from a pheromone called MCH (3-methylcyclohexenone), a naturally occurring repellant that is non-toxic and environmentally safe.

All we had to do was staple these MCH packets onto the trees, spaced about 40 paces apart in a grid-like fashion. A web of scent would form, a invisible shield against the invasion.

It’s not cheap, though. Each packet costs $3.50. It lasts for 60 to 100 days. And it’s not a one-and-done fix; you have to repeat the process for three years in a row.

There are rough edges, of course. The patches are sensitive to temperature. If it gets too hot, they release their scent too early, wasting the protection. And if a tree is already infected, the MCH has zero impact. It’s a preventative tool, not a cure. Forestry experts warn that this is not a silver bullet. It’s a temporary measure, part of a broader plan that includes sanitation logging and forest thinning.

Doing this felt like a drop in the bucket, yes. But for each tree protected, it’s an important one. The dystopian look of these dying trees, set against the never-ending rise in global temperatures, a frighteningly low snowpack, and escalating wildfire risk, is a swirl of place-based change. It’s the reality of living in the valley.

As the sun set over the backside of Aspen Mountain, the gray skeletons of the Douglas-firs stood stark against the fading light. The air was cool, carrying the sharp, resinous smell of pine and the faint, sweet scent of the MCH packets we had just stapled into the bark. You could feel the weight of the forest, fragile and waiting, holding its breath for the next generation of beetles.