It blew a gale here too Thursday night into Friday.  A lot of branches down, but no trees - at least not in my yard - except for a dwarf Alberta spruce in a pot!! 

It looks like new trees are growing up to replace the ones lost to beetles. That must be a good thing, right? Are the beetles still around or was that just a particularly bad (but temporary) infestation? Will the new trees get beetles too?

Steve. Yes, there are some pine trees that are growing. The beetles typically would not attack a tree with a trunk diameter of ~4 inches or less. So, lots of very small pine trees. And, the aspen trees will tend to invade an open area like our meadow (they grow like weeds), so we should have a nice aspen grove in there over time—if the elk, moose and deer don’t eat them all as they grow.

As I understand it, the beetles are still around, but at levels that are “normal”. Years of drought yielding weak and unhealthy trees as well as a few years with higher beetle populations led to the massive kill from a few years ago. And, there are new threats to the remaining trees such as certain kinds of moths, etc. So, it is nature rebalancing herself over time. All this leads to tremendous risk for fire, which of course would “correct” things over a 100 years or so.