Frozen pay offs

Well I got a little lost in Fox Lake so my one hour walk turned into a four hour walk! Although frozen, I got to seem some really neat things... One of them was snow prints! Given the pairs of tracks, their size, and how far north we are, I am guessing it is the tracks of the least or short-tailed weasel - that's my best guess anyways. Sometimes snow can make identification hard because you can't see individual tracks very well. Then I saw a pine grosbeak, you could really see the red when it flew away and such a pretty song. Then I saw the most bizarre thing.. pink/red aspen trees. It looked like a big shaker from the sky had poured red powder on the trees. At closer inspection it was red flecks all over the bark but didn't stick out or anything, really flat lichen, maybe?? I'm really not sure. And it was just the one block of trees. It reminded me of the pink bellies of fish... interesting.. the rest of the aspen trees here as I mentioned before look really white so the red really stands out. Another interesting thing I saw was a fence I saw (there aren't very many of them around here, but this one outlines the airfield and the posts were made of aspen trees, makes sense seeming there are so many aspen trees, just interesting instead of seeing smooth wood posts, seeing chunks of tree with wire in between.. I almost wondered if they were actually rooted trees just cut off at such and such a height.