Joan Shapiro didn’t notice the swarms of gnats until Saturday night, but at that point, it was all she could take.

They covered the windows, attracted to the lights shining from inside her cabin in Idlewild, above Ouray.

She opened the refrigerator and they buzzed inside, toward the light.

When she looked at her cellphone while lying in bed, there they were, uninvited and whizzing around her head, drawn to the illuminated screen.

“I said, ‘I can’t take this anymore. This is war,’” she sa...