Aaron and I were doing the trip of a lifetime together. I invited my cousin—a Manhattan office worker who lives in a Brooklyn apartment—to come take a break from city life out in the Boundary Waters. We had started planning in February, and now we were experiencing out-of-control mosquitoes, an intense heat wave, and rugged portages—the whole works. Little did we know, those trials by fire were going to be just stick kindling compared to the real fires ahead.
We entered on July 10 at Round Lake, mid-way up the Gunflint Trail. After crossing Round, we portaged past the BWCA Wilderness sign, took the obligatory photos for Aaron’s first-ever visit, and climbed up to Missing Link Lake. A pair of loons tending two fluffy chicks greeted us to this utopian lake.
Next was the arduous portage down to Tuscarora Lake. Winding well over a mile through bogs and brush, this rocky trail was a true test in the steamy July heat. We had struggled our way almost to the end, when suddenly we hit a flooded section through knee-deep water. Half-crazy already from bugs and sweat, this new challenge felt like punishment. Still, Aaron took it like a champ. We refreshed with a dip in Tuscarora, then finished paddling for the day.
The moment we beached the canoe at a fabulous Tuscarora island campsite, feeling ravenous for dinner, a swarm of mosquitoes, the likes of which Aaron had never seen before, descended upon us in a rage. Let’s just say, Aaron is tough.
The heat kept intensifying on day two. After a slow recovery morning, we broke camp and crossed six lakes and five portages to reach Little Saganaga Lake—our end destination. I was proud of our day’s accomplishment as we pulled up to another picturesque island campsite. The temperature had been well in the 90s all day, but here a consistent southwest breeze was bringing us some relief. We praised the wind, feasted on Thai coconut curry, and slept peacefully in the airy tent.
Day three dawned hotter still, with increased winds. We embraced another recovery morning in camp, then continued further west on Little Sag. By midday there were whitecaps, so we pulled into the lee of a tiny island for a break. We had just entered the main lake basin, with open views in all directions. There, with our first clear view to the north, we saw a massive plume of smoke rising from the forest. This was it—a wildfire was burning on our port side, and we were a long ways from our own port.
We looked at each other uneasily. The fire was close enough that we could distinctly see where it was rising out of the forest. The sky above us wasn’t hazy or smoke covered; on the contrary, there was a well-defined plume being carried directly northeast by strong winds. The trials we had dealt with to this point disappeared instantly. Mosquitoes, extreme heat, and rocky portages were just personal issues; this fire was bigger than us.
Surprise, then relief
It felt like the fire sprung up right next to us. We wondered how long it had actually been burning? We had no idea it was there until we got that north sightline on Little Sag. Aaron recounted the moment later: “I thought it was really interesting at first, just to see a wildfire. In all my trips out west to Montana, I had never seen any actual forest fires.” The anonymous-to-us blaze, which is now named the Little Knife Fire, was producing a huge plume, so we knew it had been burning a while.
After a few minutes of awe, we suddenly realized there was a second, bigger fire, burning slightly further away in the same general direction. This second blaze, we found out later, was the Ottertrack Fire, burning just across the border in Canada.
Having the sightline to what we considered the closer fire’s base was critical, Aaron notes: “I definitely felt more comfortable, even though the fire wasn’t far away, in the sense that we could really dial in where exactly we thought it was located.”
Knowing the fire’s origin helped us plot where we thought it might be going next. Of course we were just guessing, but it was an educated guess. We could problem solve with the firsthand information we had. We started considering our options.
Making our way out
Looking at the plume, which was intensifying by the minute, we saw the fire was heading northeast. Our car back on Round was also located northeast, so we projected the fire would track parallel—not directly—at us. We were two days out, and considering that it was already 2:30 p.m. when we spotted the fire, we knew we weren’t going to make it back across Litte Sag-Mora-Tarry-Crooked-Owl-Tuscarora-Missing Link-Round in a day.
“It was interesting to look at the map and come up with alternative routes, in case we had to evacuate,” notes Aaron. “The fire really did add a thrill to the second half of the trip. Instead of just turning around to go back, and everything being jolly, you had this wildfire looming in the background of your mind. You were always kind of wondering if it would sneak up on you or not. That definitely added an extra layer of curiosity and uncertainty that wasn’t there before.”
We paddled off Little Sag with a great tailwind, then put in on Mora. The plume continued to parallel us as we forged on into Tarry, Crooked, and Owl. We were beat by the time we got back up to Tuscarora, just in time for the sunset mosquitoes. We were nervous that everybody in the area would be converging here, and there would be no campsites for the night.
Instead, the opposite happened. Tuscarora was silent. Not a soul on the west end. We could have taken any site we wanted. Other campers must have been evacuating sooner than us. Maybe they couldn’t tell where the fire was. Maybe they had seen the smoke sooner than us. This area was more “downstream” of the plume. Whatever the case, it was just us and the loons on Tuscarora that night, plus millions of skeeters. We noted that the wind died off at dusk—good for helping that fire die down, very bad for mosquito prevention…
We woke up early (by our standards) on Monday, the 13th, and got back on trail. Right off the bat we hit the 426-rod Tuscarora portage—all uphill. Interestingly, there didn’t seem to be much, if any, smoke in the air. The sky was blue overhead, and the intense heat was back. So was the wind—again blowing from the southwest. That consistent wind all four days was reassuring in its own way. We projected the fire was still paralleling us.
Finally, at Missing Link, we noticed the fire was back. The plume had reformed, and seemed to be closer. Now making our way more north than east, we came into the smoke zone on our last portage into Round. “In the center of that portage,” Aaron recalls, “when I looked down at the ground, all the shadows were a burnt orange color, because of the smoke above us. The lighting was super interesting. Very beautiful in its own way. But also kind of ominous. You really didn’t want to hang out and stick around to find out how far away the fire was, even though we knew it was quite far.”
A good motivator
My 47 year-old bones were worn out from four days of portaging and paddling by the time we got back on Round. But you would never call this trip a slog. Not with fire edging us on the whole way back. “Fire is a good motivator,” Aaron laughs. We later found out the Little Knife Fire is burning approximately 8 miles away from where we first saw it from Little Sag.
Looking back, what stayed with us wasn’t fear so much as the constant need to pay attention. Every breeze, every change in the smoke, every bend in the route became part of the decision-making and the distance between us and the exit. The Boundary Waters hadn’t changed—but our relationship to it had.
“I think we did exactly what we were supposed to do,” Aaron recounts. “Since we saw it from a safe distance, the first thing we did was pull out the map, attempt to identify to the best of our ability where the fire was located, and its distance away. We also had a lot of discussions about the vegetation and how fast we thought the fire could travel. We had a conversation about finding alternative routes out, if we had to do that. I think those conversations were critical. We never really felt like we were in a worst-case scenario, but even discussing how to filter air through wet clothing was something important to discuss, just in case.”
Finally, we learned that canoeing parallel to a forest fire raises the intensity many notches. Now that we’re back to our usual lives in Duluth and Brooklyn, the smoke from many other forest fires has followed us home, reminding us of all the lessons from our first fire in the BWCA.
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