Should I remove or save my colorado blue spruce?
Colorado Blue Spruce isn't a habitual problem species, so a sound one is usually worth an opinion before it comes out. Purdue's position is blunt: blue spruce is a poor landscape choice for Indiana, because a Rocky Mountain tree adapted to dry cool air is being asked to live in humid heat on compacted clay. The result is that nearly every mature blue spruce in central Indiana is somewhere along the road to Rhizosphaera needle cast, and the call is almost always "half my tree is bare, can it be saved."
How to tell which one you've got
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.
The structural question
Structurally it is one of the more reliable conifers under ice — stiff whorled branching sheds load well, and honestly most blue spruces are killed by disease long before they become a storm risk. The genuine concern is the defoliated survivor: a bare lower trunk under a still-heavy top catches wind like a sail, and that profile on shallow roots in saturated clay is how blue spruce go over whole in a straight-line wind event.
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