Mosquitoes hatch late but expect a summer buzz in Crested Butte

Cold keeps early hatch down, makes second hatch worse

They’re out en masse, biting our flesh and drinking our blood, but the mosquito control effort won’t make it to Crested Butte this summer.

The Gunnison office of Colorado Mosquito Control (CMC) started its aerial offensive against the pests on Thursday, July 2 inside the boundaries of the control area, which encompasses the “valley proper” around the city of Gunnison, according to CMC’s western slope operations manager, Chris Kruthaupt.
The insecticide spray will cover more than 12,000 acres without touching Crested Butte, because Gunnison is where the money for the operation comes from.
Even though the mosquito mitigation is partially funded by Gunnison County, the city of Gunnison and residents of the control area, who pay a tax dedicated to paying a portion of the bill, share two-thirds of the cost, while the north end of the valley chips in just about nothing.
“We’re not contracted to go up to anyplace in Crested Butte,” Kruthaupt says. “I would like to extend those borders and incorporate more of an area and there has been some talk of it, but those conversations never gained any traction.”
Kruthaupt says CMC started working in Gunnison County in the early 1990s and a resolution, signed by the Board of County Commissioners in 2003, reaffirmed the current boundaries.
The control area is contained inside a line that runs from the city’s south end at Hartman Rocks to McCabe Lane, to Allen and Wiley Lanes north of the city of Gunnison, and down through Signal Peak to the east.
That doesn’t mean there are more mosquitoes around Gunnison than there are around Crested Butte. In fact, the number of mosquitoes caught in traps between the two communities is about the same.
In addition to contracting with the county and the city of Gunnison, CMC has contracts with some local homeowners associations and other groups for mosquito control treatment. Kruthaupt says the traps they have set at Hidden River Ranch, south of Crested Butte, are showing a number of mosquitoes comparable to traps in other areas of the county.
Over all, despite the shock of the first mosquito hatch, the traps are suggesting that this year is nothing like years past. Some traps around the county that presently have no mosquitoes in them this year had 1,200 in 2007.
At an annual update on Tuesday, June 23, Kruthaupt told the Gunnison Board of County Commissioners, “What we’ve been noticing the last two years is that the peak in our traps has been pushed back. [The hatch] follows the temperatures pretty well and you’ve had a cold beginning to this summer.”
 He says the Gunnison Valley usually experiences several major mosquito hatches throughout the summer and the cool temperatures early this year could have squeezed the timing of the first two hatches so close together that it appeared to be one large hatch.
 So the focus changed from treating larvae to attacking the adults, which will not affect the number of adult mosquitoes out biting during the peak of the hatch which comes later in the season. The early treatment will kill only mosquitoes that are now adults.
There are more than 20 species of mosquito common to Gunnison County and, depending on the variety, they can live between three and 100 days.
In response to questions from commissioner Hap Channell, Kruthaupt said, “Ideally we could knock them all down if we spray after the peak… I would rather put out less pesticide than more and if we miss it then we’ll go back out.”
The timing of the treatment matters more now than it had in the past because the chemical composition of the pesticide has changed from an oil-based product to an “orange peel and citrus oil” product that isn’t as effective at killing mosquitoes in all life stages, Kruthaupt says.
If the treatment is sprayed before the Fourth of July, it would kill many of the mosquitoes around Gunnison and spare people who are outside for the holiday, but it would probably miss the peak of the hatch, he says.
Even that doesn’t guarantee a mosquito-free holiday, however, since mosquitoes can travel as far as five miles from home on a stiff breeze.
And people in north end of the valley can rest easier knowing that the mosquitoes biting them on the Fourth should not be carrying West Nile Virus. Those mosquitoes, Culex mosquitoes, won’t come out until the end of July.