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The National Parks of the United States are all quite beautiful. Even when man doesn't start a fire and destroys that beauty, Mother Nature has her own way of changing the landscape. This area of Glacier National Park in Montana did not hold a lot of wonderful color and lush greenery, but its nakedness caught my eye and I wanted to document the devastation the bark beetle has brought to the park. And yes, man was involved. It is believed that his logging of the forests helped spread the beetle. In this photo, you can see the spindles which represent the fir trees that were ravished by the hungry beetles with fresh growth pines in the foreground. The air appears unclear due to the fires raging within the park, although they were contained to one area. The rangers hoped that fires might stop the advancement of the beetles to other pine areas of the park.

The sun was out, the weather beautiful and probably one of the last warm days of the year. So I gathered my camera equipment together and headed out to the Chicago lakefront to see what I could find. Thought I would see people taking their last strolls of the season along the beaches but instead found this scene of two Lifeguard chairs chained together and pulled back from the shoreline. My though was to capture that sense of preparedness for the coming winter months. Although the chains linking the two chairs together are small in the shot, they represent the standing together until summer returns