Dead piñon, Sandia Mountains, February 2014

One of the casualties of drought is the piñon in the mountains of New Mexico. I took this picture back in February in the Sandias, the mountains on the eastern edge of Albuquerque. Where you see snow the slopes are generally north-facing. No snow is south-facing, and that’s where you see brown trees.

I tweaked the picture in Lightroom to give a false-color image of the dead trees in red:

Dead piñon, false color, by John Fleck, February 2014