The widening sea of red trees surrounding Helena will soon likely be accompanied by the buzz of chain saws, and city officials believe the scope of the cutting work - and replanting - could cost up to $2 million.

Helena natural resources coordinator Brad Langsather said the city will need roughly $825,000 just to cut the dead trees he observed this spring in Helena's 2,140 acres of open spaces.

Langsather recently told officials the infestation of the mountain pine bark beetle will result in a landscape change unseen since the birth of the Capital City. Many of the ponderosa pines in the Helena area are dead, and most of the living trees will die in the next few years.

City officials are exploring options to pay for the work. They believe it's crucial to cut the trees to reduce the danger of a wildfire entering Helena from the South Hills.

Helena has thinned stands on 284 acres in recent years, but the work is evolving as the beetles' onslaught becomes more widespread. While previous jobs focused on thinning small trees and undergrowth, the city will have to begin cutting most of the larger trees to remove the standing deadfall. Workers will leave a few snags per acre for wildlife habitat, and will likely remove fewer trees, like the Douglas fir, that aren't affected by the bugs.

Langsather estimates it will take five years to do the cutting work. When it's finished, Helena's backdrop will be much more open.

"It's going to change the recreational experience people are going to have," he said. "We're not in a selective-thinning-of-small-trees type of world now."

Langsather said he wants to use all available options, from horses and the assistance of volunteer organizations to mechanized equipment, which will become necessary in stands with trees too large to handle by people.

Replanting work will commence where needed in conjunction with the cutting, he said. That process likely will continue over the course of the next decade.

The large patch of red trees on the eastern face of Mount Helena will be the first to go - officials expect to receive $80,000 in state grant money this fall. Coupled with $60,000 in city funds, the work is likely to get under way in September. Langsather said the stands are the largest with 100 percent mortality he's seen in the city's open lands.

The city also will begin removing trees on the mountain above Le Grande Cannon Boulevard later this year, and $530,000 worth of work - most of it paid for by the Federal Emergency Management Agency - is set for the South Hills next year.

On the city's 2,140 acres of open lands - 1,387 acres of which are forested - about 500 acres are infested, equal to 36 percent of the city's treed lands. The city has Douglas fir on about 277 acres, and those trees aren't affected by the beetles.

With some 800,000 pines in the city's open space, Helena will soon be overwhelmed with cut timber, and few market possibilities. The city has been taking logs to the Low-Income Energy Assistance Program's storage yard, but Helena will soon have more firewood than the organization can handle.

"We're going to have this stuff up to our ears," Langsather said.

He attributed the causes of the infestation to climate change and a century of forest-fire suppression. Stands throughout the West were devastated by the early 20th century, but have been allowed to regenerate.

The beetles are a natural part of the ecosystem, but ongoing drought - which weakens the trees - and an abundant food supply have allowed them to go on a feeding frenzy not seen in modern history. Fewer cold snaps in winter mean more beetles survive to feed in the summer.

Langsather, who spent years as a forester before joining the city last year, said he first noticed the beetles' expansion in 2000. The infestation has since exploded.

"This is the first time we have seen this many ecosystems affected all at one time," he said. "It's now the largest insect outbreak that the Rocky Mountain West has ever seen."

Millions of acres in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Idaho have become infested. Up north, the situation is even worse - an estimated 33 million acres (more than 51,000 square miles) of pine forests have died in British Columbia, and strong winds have blown the bugs eastward into Alberta.

Langsather said some have suggested the killing spree is more widespread in Canada because climate change has only recently allowed beetles to survive in increasingly mild winters, and trees there haven't had to resist the beetles in the past.

Roughly 400,000 acres in the Helena National Forest are infested.

Officials said they would explore all options, from loans to state and federal grant funding, to help pay for the work.

Larry Kline: 447-4075 or larry.kline@helenair.com