A mother and her two calves were running amock through an Anchorage neighborhood. Obviously frightened and trying to find a way back to the woods. We waited for them to cross and then went the other way.
A trail into Anchorage's Earthquake Park. The trail which goes down from the road was once a hill full of houses that slid into Cook Inlet after the 1964 quake.
Here you see begin to see how interior forests are in the throes of the worst spruce beetle outbreak ever recorded. Millions of acres hosted billions of beetles. Spruce beetles are native to the United States. They occur from Arizona to Alaska and across Canada. “Changing climate conditions impact the health of the trees,” says U.S. Forest Service entomologist Jessie Moan. “Heat or water stressed trees will be more susceptible to beetles.” Today’s warmer conditions allow beetles to compress their two-year lifecycle into one, leading to higher numbers of mature beetles searching for fresh tree hosts. Entire forests can succumb, leaving behind a serious risk of fire.
