Morning presentation by Jesse Logan (photo courtesy of Adam & Erin Switalski)
(photo courtesy of Adam & Erin Switalski)
Main Street, Cooke City: heading toward the snow
The tour begins
Skiing through one of the 1988 burn areas
Jesse Logan answering questions during our lunch break
Our first dead whitebark
Skinning up into climax whitebark forest
Dead whitebark; Jesse peels off the bark to look for beetle galleries
Looking across the valley; the upper sections of the forest have some dead whitebark
Characteristic mountain pine beetle galleries
Some living and some dead whitebark in (formerly) climax whitebark forest
Beetle galleries in a dead whitebark; the beetles got this tree, but woodpeckers ate all the beetle larvae so at least this tree won't produce another generation of beetles
Dying whitebark pine tree (probably attacked summer '09)
Jesse took off a bit of bark to expose the beetle galleries in this dying tree
Mountain pine beetle galleries, with a beetle (a tiny black speck) in the middle of the right-hand gallery
Mountain pine beetle (fuzzy, but good for a sense of scale)
back to town
where the snow ends...
