By Charlie Mahler
Natural fires in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness – those started by lightning rather than, say, by careless campers – provide opportunities and risks for the managers of the BWCAW and the surrounding Superior National Forest. Since the Forest Service doesn’t set fires in the wilderness for ecological purposes, natural fires provide singular opportunities for forest administrators to let fire – the main natural disturbance in the region and the catalyst for regeneration and secession in the forest – help them manage the ecosystem.
Contrarily, managers of the Superior National Forest do set fires in the wilderness for safety reasons. The 1999 Blowdown prompted a still-ongoing prescribed burning regime intended to reduce the risk of wildfire to property and lives outside the wilderness, mainly along the Gunflint Trail.
But, while natural fire offers managers the prospect of resetting the forest’s succession timetable in managing the forest’s mosaic of tree species and ages, the fires don’t typically ignite in optimal locations to meet all the Forest Service’s ecological goals. Some fires (like the Turtle Lake Fire in 2006) burn near busy wilderness travel corridors. Others start close to the wilderness boundaries, threatening people, property, and harvestable timber, and others flare near the 1999 Blowdown and its heavy fuels.
Managers, then, attempt to balance the needs of nature versus the needs of society when fires appear in the forest stressing that human safety takes precedent over the needs of the ecosystem. Indeed, prior to the Pagami Creek Fire, none of the 435 natural fires that burned in the BWCAW since 1987 grew beyond the wilderness boundaries. The wilderness forest southeast of Pagami Creek hadn’t experienced a major fire since 1910, when, according to the research of pioneering Boundary Waters forest ecologist Miron Heinselman, fires burned a swath of forest from Disappointment Lake in the north, through the area east of Lake Four, and down to the south of Wilder Lakes. Heinselman found evidence of fires in that area dating back to 1796. The most recent disturbances to the forests impacted by the Pagami Creek Fire, however, were logging operations in the area prior to its being designated a wilderness in 1978.
“This entire country was really heavily logged in the early 1900s and as late as the 1970s they were still pulling timber out of some of this country,” Bruce Giersdorf, a Fire Behavior Analyst on the Pagami Creek Fire, explained. “So, the actual mosaic of the entire fire is quite diverse.”
The mosaic included unlogged riparian forests, where the fire ignited, and was comprised of a lot of “dead-and-down” trees. Where logging was most intensive, less “dead-and-down” fuel remained, but thick stands of 50 to 70 year-old regenerated timber populated the forest.
Ironically, the 1999 Blowdown has been an on-going fire concern in the Boundary Waters for more than a decade, and was instrumental in fueling the 31,830 acre Cavity Lake Fire in 2006 and the 36,443 acre Ham Lake Fire in 2007 near the Gunflint Trail. Those fuels did not play a significant role in the Pagami Creek Fire, according to Giersdorf.
“The pockets [of 1999 blowdown] were quite small, we’re not talking tens of thousands of acres, we’re not even talking thousands of acres, probably more in the terms of hundreds.”
Still, a raging fire consuming nearly 100,000 acres of forest – the sort of fire managers have feared the blowdown could produce – was what the Pagami Creek Fire metamorphosed into on September 11 and 12.
This article appeared in Wilderness News Fall-Winter 2011 >