Pine beetles are obliterating forests throughout Colorado and the U.S. West, draining budgets as property values decline and threatening tourism at national parks, including the home of Mount Rushmore.

Voters in Colorado communities raised taxes to protect ski resorts that bring in $3 billion annually to the economy. The pine beetles, each the size of a rice grain, have devoured 25 percent of the woods in South Dakota’s Black Hills, where the mountain with massive carvings of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt is the linchpin of a $2 billion-a-year tourism industry.

“It’s difficult to stop the spread,” said Bill Smith, a South Dakota Agriculture Department conservation program administrator. “What we’re trying to do is slow it down.”

The beetles’ vast economic impact is emerging two decades into an epidemic fueled by climate change, overstocked forests and drought that wiped out 38,000 square miles — the size of Indiana and Rhode Island combined. As gray ghost forests dominate vistas in the Rockies, Tetons, Cascades and Sierras, officials from the U.S. Forest Service to state governments are searching for ways to counter the devastation.

“There is always the question, ‘When is the Forest Service going to take all the dead trees away?’” said Catherine Ross, executive director of the Winter Park-Fraser Chamber, 66 miles (100 kilometers) west of Denver. “I talk to them about the enormity of the problem. There are just so many dead trees out there.”

From Bloomberg Businessweek: https://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-06-02/pine-beetles-ravaging-forests-strain-budgets-in-u-dot-s-dot-west