Last month, Berthoud Town Forester Paul Furnas finally got the bad news he’d been dreading for years.

A local arborist meeting with a resident on the north side of town about a problematic tree on her property had detected holes and S-shaped channels beneath the bark, classic signs of the dreaded emerald ash borer.

“He called me up and said ‘how is your day going?’” Furnas recalled. “And I said ‘pretty good,’ and then he said ‘well, do you want it to get a little worse?’”

When Furnas went to see for himself, he immediately confirmed the arborist’s suspicions: the invasive beetle responsible for devastating ash tree populations across Colorado had reached Berthoud.

“This tree was so infested — the signs were all the way up the branch,” he said. “And when I started scraping the bark, I w

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