Five years of drought and its coattail-riding companion, the bark beetle, literally sucked the sap out of trees, allowed the beetle to zombie-ize the trees into The Standing Dead and have wreaked devastation upon the southern Sierra forests from the El Dorado to the Sequoia. Dead trees. Lots of dead trees. About 66 million of them, according to the U.S. Forest Service’s estimates revised a couple of weeks ago.