As sunset softens the vast Colorado sky into warm shades of pink and blue, the sound of chainsaws jars the stillness of this remote and rugged wilderness.
A forest service team works quickly, felling dozens of dead or dying lodgepole pines, the majestic trees that have towered over this region for generations. They are locked in a race against the mountain bark beetle, a tiny insect the size of a rice kernel, which is devouring unprecedented swathes of woodland across the US and Canadian north-west.
"It has reached a level where we cannot do anything to stop the bark beetle," said Clint Kyhl, a bark beetle incident commander for the US Forest Service. "So now our main focus is mitigating the impact of all these dead and dying trees."
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Comment: Three of the Great Lakes are frozen over. While this happens once or twice a decade it is still shows the strength of this current winter's severe cold.
Graphics of the Great Lakes ice coverage can be seen here:
West Composite March 05, 2009
East Composite March 05, 2009