To tell if a cane is dead or alive snip off a short piece and look at the inside. If it is a greenish white or lite cream color and looks moist it's alive. If it's a brown or dark tan and looks dried out it's dead. Keep cutting back in small pieces until you get to that whitish center. From there down the cane should be OK.

Are you using those rose cones to cover your roses? I don't recommend those because in order to get them on you have to prune the roses very short in the fall. You should not prune your roses in the fall unless they are extremely tall. Even then you can stake them instead of cutting them back. Roses store food for the spring in the canes and by pruning them off in the fall you are pruning off all their food stores. Roses should be pruned in the late winter/early spring. The cones also create an environment that is just right for growing fungal diseases. Your roses may have been kept too moist and now have canker.

This has been an unusually cold winter in many places so it is possible that your roses did not survive the polar vortexes as well.

For fall protection next time, you may want to check some old threads or post a new one in September or October and we can coach you in some relatively straightforward ways to protect roses with better odds for survival. Of course, in cold zones there are some roses that won't survive regardless, so it might not be the cone's fault.

Cynthia