INFESTATION
a novella in three parts
John S. Beckmann
September - November 2015
"The Knife Point Glacier is on the eastern side of the continental divide in the Wind River range of mountains in the U. S. State of Wyoming. The glacier is in the Fitzpatrick National Forest in the Shoshone Wilderness among the largest grouping of glaciers in the American Rocky Mountains. Knife Point Glacier flows to the north below the summit of Knife Point Mountain (13,001 feet).
Along with other glaciers in the Wind River Range, the glacier’s rapid retreat after the Little Ice Age of the 1850's has exposed many specimens of the extinct Rocky Mountain locust (melanoplus spretus). The Rocky Mountain locust ranged through the western United States and some parts of western and southern Canada during the 19th century. Sightings placed their numbers far greater than those of other locusts. One swarm observed in 1875 covered 198,000 square miles, an area larger than the State of California and was thought to consist 12.5 trillion insects. Less than 30 years later, the species was apparently extinct. The last recorded sighting of a live specimen occurred southern Canada in 1902. Because a species so abundant and ubiquitous was never expected to become extinct, almost no specimens of the insect were collected. However, recently expeditions have gathered some examples of Melanoplus spretus from the Knife Point Glacier in Wyoming and the Grasshopper Glacier in Montana – at these locations, swarms of locusts were caught in snowstorms and frozen into glaciers. North American is the only continent without a major locust species, apart from Antarctica."
Adapted from Wikipedia and citing Jeff Lockwood, et. al. "Preserved Grasshopper Fauna at Knife Point Glacier, Fremont County, Wyoming" in Arctic and Alpine Research, Vol. 23, p. 1.
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