{"id":2446314,"date":"2019-07-14T13:29:25","date_gmt":"2019-07-14T19:29:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=309421"},"modified":"2019-07-14T13:29:25","modified_gmt":"2019-07-14T19:29:25","slug":"colorado-ranch-made-lab-turning-beetle-kill-trees-into-lumber-in-name-of-forest-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/colorado-ranch-made-lab-turning-beetle-kill-trees-into-lumber-in-name-of-forest-health\/","title":{"rendered":"Colorado ranch-made-lab turning beetle-kill trees into lumber in name of forest health"},"content":{"rendered":"
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At the 172,000-acre Trinchera Blanca Ranch, forest managers pile unusable wood around aspen groves to prevent elk from eating young sprouts.<\/strong>
John McEvoy \/ Special to The Colorado Sun<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

BLANCA \u2014 Dead trees raked from the forest floor are piled into fences more than a dozen feet high. Inside the tangled-timber barricades are verdant forests of aspens. On the other side is a barren landscape, where armies of marauding ungulates munch every aspen shoot that pushes through the dirt. <\/p>\n

The aspen havens span hundreds of acres across the 172,000-acre Trinchera Blanca Ranch flanking southern Colorado\u2019s San Luis Valley. And they are only a sliver of the forest-management strategies at the ranch that are emerging as a model for the most progressive science bolstering forest health across a drought-stricken Intermountain West. <\/p>\n

 \u201cWe go big at things,\u201d says Ty Ryland, who moved to the ranch as a kid in 1969 and took over management of the spread from his father in 1990. \u201cTo manage this many acres, you can\u2019t do things small scale.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nothing is small at Trinchera, as the ranch is known locally. Three peaks on the ranch reach past 14,000 feet. The ranch\u2019s owner, renowned conservationist and financier Louis Bacon, locked the ranch\u2019s acreage into a conservation easement preventing development. And then he gave that easement to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the largest in the agency\u2019s history. <\/p>\n

Almost a decade after purchasing the ranch from the family of Malcolm Forbes in 2007, Bacon opened a sawmill near the ranch gate in the village of Blanca. Today, that lumber operation processes about 12 million log feet of timber a year, yielding about 20 million board feet of lumber that is sold to builders in 60 cities across more than two dozen states. Most every tree that arrives at the Blanca Forestry Products sawmill is coming from Trinchera, where forest scientists, wildlife biologists and cutting-edge loggers are developing a forest-thinning model for improving ailing woodlands.  <\/p>\n

Read the full story via The Colorado Sun<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The Colorado Sun is a reader-supported news organization dedicated to covering the people, places and policies that matter in Colorado. Read more, sign up for free newsletters and subscribe at <\/em>coloradosun.com<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the 172,000-acre Trinchera Blanca Ranch, forest managers pile unusable wood around aspen groves to prevent elk from eating young sprouts.John McEvoy \/ Special to The Colorado Sun BLANCA \u2014 Dead trees raked from the forest floor are piled into fences more than a dozen feet high. Inside the tangled-timber barricades are verdant forests of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2446314","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-21 08:24:44","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2446314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2446314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2446314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2446314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2446314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2446314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}