Pierce: It looks like a clear cut, where all the trees are down, lying flat, typically all in the same direction. The winds came along in the same direction and laid everything down. As far as being on the ground and trying to open up a portage, it's like going through walls of trees. It's hard to find the portage and you just keep cutting.Around Blackstone Lake, tree trunks, many of them a foot and more in diameter, lie across the trail every few feet. Often the way is blocked by the roots of toppled trees, masses of earth and roots standing as tall as a person. All around, the scattered tall trees left standing after the storm, rise above tangled masses of downed trunks and underbrush. Devastated as the area appears, Crew leader Pete Weckman says the damage here is relatively mild.
Weckman: I'd say on a scale of 1 to 10, it's probably a five, but as you can see, there's not many trees left out here. It's terrible. It's bad.Each fallen trunk removed from the trail takes about 4 cuts with a chainsaw. The path becomes littered with sawdust as sawyers cut through each log, take a few steps forward, then cut again. Other crew members, called swampers, follow behind, heaving the cut logs and branches to the side of the trail. Opening this hiking trail is backbreaking. Crew member John Pierce says it's also dangerous.
Pierce: The trees go down, they criss-cross each other, they're held up by other trees, or branches of the same tree, and a lot of them are lying on top of each other. So if you cut one, a lot of trees can shift, they can spring up or back or sidewise.The sound of a chainsaw can carry for miles across the remote lakes of the Boundary Waters. It's an area where environmentalists have fought for generations to keep motors out, but so far, environmental groups have voiced few objections to the chainsaws.
Latourell: I heard about people being upset, you know like "when are they going to come with the chainsaws?". They were just happy they could come in there and cut it because they were knocking their Winona canoes all to heck.Normally, motors are prohibited in most of the Boundary Waters except in emergencies. In the days immediately following the storm, chainsaws were essential to open portages quickly to search for and rescue injured campers.
Arnosti: It would be a jarring experience for the next 18 months in a large portion of the wilderness for you to hear incessantly chainsaws going.The Boundary Waters has been the subject of more legislation and court battles than any wilderness in the United States. Conservationists over the generations have struggled to get logging, float planes, and motorboats banned from an area set aside as a place for quiet and solitude.
Arnosti: What is it that we're trying to do with this wilderness? Is it supposed to be a KOA campground or a Disneyland with so many beds? Are we supposed to have 1,000 hotel beds up there every night during June, July and August and is that what's it about?Given the area's combative history, it's possible any decisions the Forest Service makes will spur controversy. One major question that lies ahead is how to deal with the fire danger caused by tens of millions of downed trees.
Frelich: The fir is a very flammable vegetation type, and then when the budworm kills some of it, you have a mixture of live and dead trees. That fuel type will support a very high-intensity fire. Balsam fir is commonly used as a Christmas tree and if you've ever thrown your dead Christmas tree in the fireplace, you know what happens.The storm-downed trees lie mostly in a narrow swath running from west to east, some 35-miles long. Forest Service officials fear a fire starting in this continuous bed of fuel could be fanned by the region's prevailing west-to- east winds, and sweep over the wilderness's eastern border, into the resorts and cabins along the Gunflint Trail.
Tine: We're going to have to do it, there's no question about it. It's just moving ahead with getting the authority we need to do it, getting the plans in place, getting the dollars to have the equipment we need, and the trained personnel to do the job.Right now, the Forest Service does not have the authority to set fires in the wilderness, although the agency is allowed to let naturally occuring fires burn.
Tine: If we can get those things in place before we have a really bad fire situation develop, then we can start going to the source, which is, basically, the fuel bed that lies within the wilderness.The prescribed burning could begin next spring.
Arnosti: We would be interested that whatever they did would mimic natural processes, because what occurred here is part of the ecology of the area as fires would be. And many times controlled burns in multiple-use areas of the forest include bulldozing fire areas around the perimeter of the wilderness, and that would not be appropriate in the wilderness.Where fires burn will shape the face of the Boundary Waters for years to come. The University of Minnesota's Frelich says the species of trees that grow back after the storm will depend on whether or not the areas are burned, as will the other plants and wildlife. But Frelich cautions that if you think of the boundary waters as a mosaic of different species, the small fires set or managed by humans will only influence a few tiles in the mosaic. The major changes will come with a fire too big to be controlled. The last giant fire in the Boundary Waters was in 1910. Frelich says sooner or later, another one like it is inevitable.
Frelich: Eventually we'll have a summer with a very severe drought, and some fires will get going whether by lightening, or escaped fires caused by people. Eventually, we're going to get a year like that and it's going to burn a huge chunk of the Boundary Waters. Those fires are really not controllable by any action that the Forest Service or anyone else can take. We're talking 50- to 100-foot-high flames. Those fires just play themselves out like they did in Yellowstone in 1988.The Yellowstone fires and their natural after-effects - spectacular wildflower displays, new forests and meadows coming back, wildlife diversity in the burned areas - led to an increased acceptance of fire as part of nature, and it's possible something similar will occur in the Boundary Waters.
Barnes: It's like the fires out in Yellowstone that burned and now they're reconsidering the thoughts about extinguishing them. They ought to just let them go, because 10 or 15 years afterwards, it's just so much richer environment out there, and I expect the same thing out here, that this sort of things happen and have happened for thousands of years.So far, the Boundary Waters is not seeing a drop in visitors because of the storm, and may not, if what happened in Yellowstone is any indication. There, visitor numbers have climbed steadily since the 1988 fire.