Ready….Aim….

Fire!

Back in 1999, a monster thunderstorm blew down the forest across hundreds of square miles of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and the Superior National Forest. Ever since then, we've been hearing "it's gonna burn."

Over the past seven years, a lot of effort has been made to mitigate the danger of a big wildfire. Area resorts and cabin owners have been given grants to clear brush from near structures and install sprinkler systems to protect buildings. Controlled burns along the Gunflint Trail (the only road through the area) reduced the amount of dead wood along the inhabited areas (by law, nobody lives in the Boundary Waters itself). A handful of wildfires have also helped clear some of the fuel from the forest, but there's only so much that can be done.

After several years of relatively good fire weather (that is, not hot and dry), this summer has brought just the kind of conditions that create big fires.

Last Thursday, July 14th, lightning hit a hillside just south of Cavity Lake, right in the middle of the blowdown area. While there was an effort to douse it with water bombers, the area was too remote and rugged for ground crews to fight the fire. So the Cavity Lake fire grew, consuming over 500 acres on its first day. On July 15th, it grew to 1,500 acres, and on the 16th it hit 6,300 acres.

With continued hot, dry weather and periods of goodly winds (and little or no rain), the fire hit 15,000 acres by the end of the day yesterday, skipping through some of the larger lakes and burning islands on Seagull Lake. It still has plenty of room to grow, with only a few percent of the blowdown area burned so far. While most of the attention has been on the large Cavity Lake fire, there is at least one other large fire burning (the Turtle Lake fire, which had burned about 900 acres as of yesterday, and has been going since July 7th), and recent lightning may have sparked dozens of other small fires which haven't yet been detected in the pall of smoke from Cavity Lake.

This could be the summer that the BWCA burns.

Supposedly, this part of the country burns about once a century or so. The last major fire was in 1910, when about 80 square miles went up in smoke. From 1911 until 1987, all wildfires were suppressed, until a "hands off" policy was adopted. Unfortunately, the 75 years of fire suppression plus the 1999 blowdown have created a situation where huge areas are all primed to burn at once.

My own slice of Northern Minnesota is about 40 miles from the Cavity Lake fire, and is outside the blowdown area (though there's a few trees on my property which got knocked down in the 1999 storm), so there's no immediate threat of fire. Even so, there's still months to go before the snow flies and ends the fire season, and if the dry weather continues, the risk will continue to get greater.