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WINTER PARK, Colo. — This ski town has stepped up its campaign to battle pine beetles, which have killed countless trees and threatened others in the surrounding valley and nearby counties.

Everyone, including residents, local government and giant resort operator Intrawest Corp., has been footing the bill to blunt the bugs' impact on a swath of Colorado, whose economy depends heavily on its scenic lands.

"The situation will get worse. It's one of those things that grows exponentially each year," said Chuck Swanson, town engineer for Winter Park. "In the next two to three years, you're really going to see it here."

Farther up the Fraser Valley in the tiny tourist town of Grand Lake, near the western entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park, the beetles already have caused far more damage to the landscape.

"We've seen what happened in Grand Lake. We're trying to prevent that from happening here," said the town of Winter Park's finance director, Nancy Anderson.

During a 1970s outbreak elsewhere in Colorado, the government launched a $20 million program to control the beetles. But now, perhaps more than ever, property owners and municipalities have been shelling out the money required to thwart the beetles and deal with the damage they cause.

The U.S. Forest Service is more likely to be providing training and advice on managing beetle-kill areas.

"This infestation is breaking all the records," said Mike Ricketts, winter-sports administrator from the Sulfur Ranger District of the Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest. "It's unprecedented."

Winter Park residents have voted to increase their property taxes to pay for beetle prevention in town, while homeowners' associations also have made spraying and tree removal a top priority. The town itself expects to spend about $338,000 in 2006 on such work.

"All of our property tax and then some for the last three years has gone to the pine-beetle mitigation," Anderson said.

As she spoke, she spotted a logging truck full of trees rumbling by outside her office window.

Intrawest, which operates the ski area on land leased from the Forest Service, spent more than half a million dollars last year alone to deal with the phenomenon, a devastating yet natural process that plays a role in the regeneration of forests.

"We have an operator at the ski area who understands the importance of trees," Ricketts said. "They're able to help us manage this area, whereas we've got thousands of acres we're not going to be able to treat."

Much of the costliest work in Winter Park has taken place on the resort's Mary Jane terrain, where skiing among the trees holds particular appeal for the experts who frequent the area.

"It was a thinning effort in advance of the beetles," said Doug Laraby, Winter Park Resort's planning director. "This area is heavily skied, and we wanted to keep healthy tree islands for skiing."

Trees also help keep the wind from scouring snow off the trails.

The effort required removing every third tree and taking them out by helicopter because of the steepness of the slopes.

Much of Summit County, too, has been hard hit by beetles, which feast on crowded, drought-weakened forests.

The problems arise when beetles drill through a tree's bark and lay eggs that later hatch into wood-eating larvae. Within a year or two, the trees go from green to rust-colored and then lose all their needles before turning gray.

The current epidemic has been a bane of ski areas and owners of the many residences that have sprouted on mountainsides in the high country. And because summer is the state's peak time for tourism, some say beetle kill creates a bigger problem at this time of year.

"There's great concern about how the county's going to look to visitors," said Sandy Briggs, executive director of Our Future Summit and the Summit County Mountain Pine Beetle Task Force in Dillon. "People want to go out and hike and bike. If they're surrounded by dead trees, it's going to be quite a sea change."

Dead and dying trees dominant the views on either side of U.S. 6, which runs along the base of Vail Resorts Inc.'s Keystone ski area near Loveland Pass. The ski resort also has been spending money to remove the dead trees and has been spraying others, according to Keystone spokeswoman Amy Kemp.

Spraying can be costly.

The beetles typically begin flying early in July, moving from infected trees in search of their next targets.

Tree-spraying firms, which have proliferated, have been busy racing against that annual deadline.

Homeowners pay anywhere from $7 to $15 for each tree they choose to spray each year, a figure that adds up quickly in Winter Park and other areas with dense stands of the lodgepole pines the beetles attack.

Sprayers often offer discounts to property owners who spray a large number of trees, so the cost per tree can vary, said Bryan Haught of Grand County Pest Control, who charges $11 to $13 for each tree he treats.

Haught said demand for his services has increased this summer.