Skeleton forests can happen from any cause of mass tree death, the most common being fire and (as here) flood. A large grove of deceased cottonwoods bathed in shallow water, along an arm of western Nebraska’s Lake McConaughy. Warm late-spring winds whistled through the upper reaches of the arboreal graveyard, their gentle gusts offering a rhythmic ode to the cycles of life on the water’s edge. Browsing a series of satellite images for the area reveals that the trees grew entirely after 1999, during a period when the lake was in a prolonged, drought-caused regime of much-below-normal water levels. The shallow, sandy cove flooded when the water rose substantially just in the previous 1–2 years before this photo, drowning the roots. These then become the ghosts of waters past.
6 NNE Ogallala NE (5 Jun 12) Looking NW
41.2047, -101.6918