An old cabin on the trail to the lake
View from the west end of the lake.
In case you haven't heard, beetles have killed millions of pine trees in the Rocky Mountains. The devastation can be seen in most national forests of Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. Mountainsides often have more dead, red lodgepole pines than live, green trees.
The beetle-killed forests aren't pretty but have made for easy firewood gathering in recent years. This weekend, though, I got a taste of the future of hiking in our new forests, and it wasn't good.
On a hike to a lake that I had never been to, I had to climb over and around numerous trees that had fallen across the trail. At times, the detour around trees was so long that I had a little trouble finding the trail again.
Most of the popular trails in our local national forest are pretty well maintained for downed trees, but a trail crew hadn't been on this route for a while.
The situation will only worsen as more dead trees fall from high winds, heavy snow or their roots rotting out. On windy days, it might be a good idea to just stay out of the forest.
As for the lake, it was a small body of water set in a high alpine ridge. A few fish rose, but I only managed to catch one brook trout. I ran into a bowhunter with a decent six-point bull he downed that morning. The weather was sunny and cool, a harbinger of fall days to come.
The trees, though, are what I will remember most about this particular hike.
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