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— If anyone has a newfound appreciation for the dangers posed by dead, standing trees, it's Sheila Wright, development director for Rocky Mountain Youth Corps.

On June 19, Wright was walking around the Seedhouse Campground in North Routt County, where corps members were busy clearing the closed campsite of hazard trees. As Wright passed under an enormous beetle-killed tree, a 5-foot-long limb - known as a widow maker - crashed down in front of her feet.

"That would have hurt, you guys," Wright exclaimed after initially laughing. "That would have freaking hurt!"

Minutes earlier, on her first drive up Seedhouse Road this year, Wright was shocked at how much the scenery has changed since last year.

"We were up here last summer, and I just don't remember all this beetle-kill," Wright said. "Look at all that beetle-kill. It's so ... evident."

All across Seedhouse Campground, red-needled lodgepole pines stick up into the air like rusty spears, piles of logs occupy campsites instead of tents, and the sound of chain saws competes with the gushing Middle Fork of the Elk River. Run your hand over a branch, and the crispy needles fall away like hair out of a brush.

"It's shocking, it's depressing, but it's not surprising," said 19-year-old corps member Sarah Yardley of New Jersey. "It's scary. I'm more worried than anything."

Wright said the mountain pine beetle promises to keep Yardley and her Rocky Mountain Youth Corps successors busy for a number of years. Never has Wright seen one thing so thoroughly dominate the corps' schedule.

"We have never had a dedicated crew just to mitigate beetle-kill," Wright said.

This year they have two such crews.

"It kind of takes over the landscape," Andreas Kavountzis, a 20-year-old corps member from New Jersey, said while sharpening a chain saw. "Dead trees everywhere. It's real depressing."

Yardley said the scene looked familiar. Her family owns a second home in Grand County, where the extent of the beetle's destruction is second only to British Columbia.

"It looks like it's fall," Yardley said of Grand County, "but evergreens aren't supposed to turn brown."