Is my colorado blue spruce dying or just stressed?

Textbook Rhizosphaera runs bottom-up and inside-out — the oldest interior needles on the lowest branches turn purplish-brown and drop, leaving bare twigs with only current-year needles at the tips, and it climbs a whorl or two per year. Count needle years to separate stress from dying: a healthy spruce holds five to seven years of needles, so a branch carrying one year with the bare zone already above head height is functionally finished, while damage confined to the bottom whorl with a dense top is still treatable. Resin bleeding on dead lower limbs means Cytospora on top of it, and that combination is a removal.