A Tiny River

Sick as a dog here yet today, but still trying to live up to promises of a post every other day.  How about just a picture for now, of the small Colorado river just miles downstream of where it begins its journey.  A lovely mountain meadow, and a friend.

Sadly, those grey forests you see on the far slopes are decaying.  No one entirely knows why, but field biologists working for the USDA are saying that insects that were once contained at lower elevations because of temperatures being inhospitable higher up are now migrating to higher elevations and attacking the spruces and firs that do not have adequate defenses for themselves.  Even then, beetle metabolisms have shot through the roof, and they are attacking immature and mature healthy trees rather than seedlings or old and diseased specimens.  Things change in nature, things die, but it sure is a sad sight to see entire ecosystems take a bullet like this.

If you have a chance to get to the Rockies, by all means, do it now.  Things might look very different even 10 years down the line.