Ham Lake Fire
After last year's Cavity Lake Fire in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, I thought I had seen The Big One: the giant forest fire we'd been promised would eventually happen after the 1999 BWCA blowdown.
It turns out I was wrong.
This spring the weather is starting out hotter and drier than last year, and the spring fire season has brought us the Ham Lake Fire. This monster started last weekend near the Gunflint Trail in northeast Minnesota, and is now some unknown size larger than 50 square miles. According to media reports, it may have grown by 20,000 acres yesterday alone. That would make it as big as the Cavity Lake fire last year, but without any hope yet of containment, and no significant precipitation in the forecast.
Worse, where last year's monster fire was mostly within the BWCA itself (where there are no cabins or resorts), this time the fire is right along the Gunflint Trail, a major route into the BWCA and hub of recreational activity. Hundreds of buildings are threatened, and dozens have been destroyed.
Since we have a chunk of land not too far from the Gunflint Trail (but about 30 miles from Ham Lake), I've been trying to track the fire's progress. I've been frustrated by the lack of timely dissemination of information through the Internet: the main information sites (such as MNICS and Inciweb) often are a day or two out of date--and for a fire which has been moving and growing as fast as this one, that's almost hopelessly old.
One alarming event happened late yesterday, when the wind shifted from mostly southerly to more northerly. The fire had been moving mostly towards Canada, but with the change in the weather it is now moving back down the Gunflint Trail towards Grand Marais. Alarmingly, the fire unexpectedly jumped Gunflint Lake late yesterday, which caused the authorities to close the Gunflint Trail at Poplar Lake and evacuate the entire area North and East of that point. Remarkably, and to the credit of everyone, there have been no fatalities or injuries so far.
To put this in context, the old roadblock had been near Gunflint Lake, which is about 3/4 of the way to the end of the Gunflint Trail. Poplar Lake is about ten miles closer to Grand Marais, and only halfway to the end of the Trail. Poplar Lake is also a third of the distance from where the fire started to my own slice of the north woods.
That's starting to get close to home.
As I understand it, the forest in the Arrowhead region of Northern Minnesota typically burns every couple hundred years or so. The last time our property burned was about a century ago, so with the right conditions another fire isn't out of the question. Firefighters on the Ham Lake fire are focusing (as they should) on protecting lives and buildings, since the fire itself is too difficult to contain at this point. The fire is going to pretty much do what it wants until there's a big soaking rain to keep it from spreading more.
Additionally, until there's more moisture, the whole region is a tinderbox. A fire started near Hibbing yesterday and within hours grew to over 170 acres, and any spark (or campfire or lightning) could have a similar effect.
We had been thinking of going camping up north over Memorial Day weekend in two weeks. Now we're not sure what we'll find.