Boundary Waters wildfires bring grief over forest loss, but hope for long-term renewal

For the canoeists and campers who share a deep affinity for the rocky, pine-studded forests and lakes of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, there is a sense of shared grief over the massive wildfires that continue to burn across the region.

Not only have the fires temporarily closed the wilderness area and slowed business to a trickle for outfitters and other tourism-related businesses in the region, they’ve also burned more than 100 square miles of forest, including huge chunks of the wilderness area, near popular, iconic border lakes including Lac LaCroix, Crooked and Knife.

But while fire is destructive in the short-term, in the long-term it's regenerative. Wildfire breathes new life into the boreal forests of northern Minnesota.

Stephanie Pearson is one of the many people grappling with those seeming contradictions. The Duluth writer has paddled in the Boundary Waters for almost her entire life. For her and others, it's a place of solitude and simplicity. Pearson was forced to evacuate from the wilderness last week when it was closed due to the fires.

She knows from past wildfires that changes to the landscape can feel shocking. Many towering red and white pine trees, hundreds of years old, will likely be gone.

"That's what's really psychologically difficult to wrap your head around because I know that in my lifetime these places are not going to grow back," Pearson said.

One hundred fifty thousand people visit the Boundary Waters every year. People love the wilderness, and they want to pass that love on to their children and grandchildren, Pearson said. “And it's a lot harder to love a place that feels alien and scarred.”

While the fire has burned large swaths of the wilderness, it doesn’t burn everything in its path, according to Nick Petrack, fire staff officer for the Superior and Chippewa National Forests. It burns in a patchwork or mosaic pattern. Some of it is low-intensity fire that burns along the forest floor.

"To the average person, you might not even know there was a surface fire coming through it,” Petrack said.

But he acknowledges other parts of the forest will look like a blackened moonscape, in areas where the fire burned hot and fast early last week, torching the tops of trees. What’s left behind will look like “basically black matchsticks,” Petrack said.

But that’s a natural process, forest experts stress. Those areas will grow back.

Northern Minnesota's boreal forest is part of what's known as a fire-dependent ecosystem. The forests here evolved with periodic wildfires. And they need fire to rejuvenate and stay healthy.

In a patch of forest next to the Dorothy Molter museum in Ely, 80 year old red pines soar overhead. The forest floor is lush and green.

Fire officials lit a prescribed fire there two years ago to clear out underbrush and provide other ecological benefits. The only sign of it now is some black charring at the base of the red pine trunks.

But red pines have evolved with wildfire, explains Kyle Gill, director of operations and forest stewardship at the University of Minnesota Cloquet Forestry Center, which also manages an experimental forest outside Ely called the Hubachek Wilderness Research Center.

"They have thick bark in order to try and protect themselves from the high heat of fire,” Gill said as he walked through the forest.

They also shed their lower branches as they age, to prevent fires from climbing into their crowns.

He pointed out other “fire-loving” species that have sprouted on the floor of the forest, including bush honeysuckle and large leaf aster. Blueberries often grow thick a few years after a fire burns, which attract moose and other wildlife. Jack pines need heat from fires to open their cones to reproduce.

Gill describes fire as a “community member” in a forest that’s not there all the time, but plays a critical role in keeping forests healthy.

“Whenever somebody says we need the rain, my immediate response is, and the forests need the fire,” he said.

Huge trees will die in the fire, Gill acknowledged.

“But that mortality is important because that then allows the next generation to have an opportunity to have the growing space that they need to get established and start thriving,” he continued.

Still, while the earth deals in centuries and even millenia, humans operate on much shorter time horizons.

Jason Zabokrtsky, who owns Ely Outfitting Company, remembers paddling through some of his favorite parts of the Boundary Waters shortly after the Ham Lake and Cavity Lake Fires burned near the end of the Gunflint Trail about 20 years ago.

"It was a little difficult for me to go back and do some of those routes because it had changed so much, and I had such memories,” Zabokrtsky said. “You know, all the big trees. And when I went back, it looked very different."

Now that he's older, Zabokrtsky tries to remind himself that change is the one constant.

"And the wilderness is always changing, and this is part of that."

The forest has grown back quickly in areas burned by recent fires in the Boundary Waters, including the Pagami Creek Fire that burned more than 90,000 acres in the wilderness in 2011.

However there are concerns that the nature of wildfires in northern Minnesota have also changed. “Since 2021, we have had a lot more large fires,” said Petrack.

The extreme conditions that drove the wildfires up to five miles in a single day last week — 100 degree temperatures, incredibly low humidity, gusty winds — “That's weather you get in Tucson, Ariz. That's not something the boreal forest is really used to,” said Petrack.

There’s also more fuel built up in the forest from years of wildfire suppression. And some scientists believe climate change could alter the forest that grows back following wildfire — that the Boundary Waters could someday be covered by grasslands rather than forest.

But Petrack encourages people to take a holistic view of the wildfires that officials say will likely burn in the Boundary Waters until the snow flies.

“The boreal forest needs to burn,” Petrack said. “This is a natural process, and it will restore itself the way it wants to.”

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