By Larry Oakes
Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
Copyright 2006 Star Tribune
All Rights Reserved
The largest wildfire to hit the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in decades expanded like a smoke-filled balloon Monday, but not far enough to prompt evacuations.
Fueled by parched winds, long-dead timber and its own upward draft, the Cavity Lake fire near the end of the Gunflint Trail grew from an estimated 4 square miles Sunday to more than 20 square miles by Monday night.
From a plane 4,000 feet over Sea Gull Lake on Monday, the fire appeared as a fortress of dirty white smoke with walls perhaps 10,000 feet high, converging into a mammoth white column and shrouding the lake below in a dusky gray-orange murk.
Two yellow water-bombing aircraft swooped in and out of the smoke, their 1,400-gallon water dumps weakly showering the head of the fire, like spurts from a garden hose onto a huge bonfire.
The fire, moving erratically in timber blown down in a 1999 storm, was within 3 miles of dozens of structures and hundreds of people living or staying along the Gunflint Trail, officials said.
But that part of the fire was bumping up against a buffer zone of prescribed burns done by the U.S. Forest Service in 2003 to reduce fire danger from the blowdown., causing it to slow and lose intensity along that flank.
“There are a lot of people getting edgy over this, but so far the fire is doing what they wanted it to do within the parameters they have in their plan,” said Carson Berglund, a spokesman for the Minnesota Interagency Fire Center.
Near the Gunflint’s end
Berglund said that the fire was still at least a mile from a “trigger point” fire officials have identified for recommending an evacuation of the end of the Gunflint Trail.
The fire, which started Friday with a lightning strike near the shore of Cavity Lake, quickly expanded during a storm Sunday night that brought high winds and lightning but little rain.
The fire expanded north to Sea Gull Lake and jumped to several of the lake’s islands, causing Forest Service officials on Monday to bar campers from Sea Gull.
“We had ash falling from the sky last night, and the glow in the sky kept us all on our toes,” Gunflint Trail outfitter Sue Prom wrote in her blog at www.canoeit.com. Prom and her husband, Mike, own Voyageur Canoe Outfitters a few miles from the fire.
Mike Prom said Monday that the fire has them wary, but not alarmed. “You definitely keep an eyeball on it,” he said. “How big it’s getting doesn’t scare me. Where it moves is the only concern.”
In all, the fire has caused the closure of a dozen portages and three BWCA entry points: Missing Link, Brandt Lake and Kekekabic Trail East. Fire officials said that more closures in that area were possible and that campers should go to www.mnics.org or call 1-218-387-1750 for updates to the list.
The fire was one of at least five in the BWCA in the past week.
Much of northern Minnesota is approaching extreme fire danger conditions, Fire Center spokeswoman Jean Bergerson said.
“We got significant lightning [Sunday] night, so there’s a concern that we don’t even know what’s out there yet,” she said. “The potential is there to have a large fire anywhere in the northern two-thirds of Minnesota.”
The prescribed-burn buffer zones so far protecting the Gunflint Trail are part of several key moves made in recent years to prepare for aggressive fires in the blowdown region of the BWCA.
Forest crews have burned more than 37,000 acres of blowdown timber since the July 4, 1999, storm. A main focus was protecting the trail from an east-moving fire such as the Cavity Lake blaze.
“It’s a good thing this fire happened when it did, instead of two years after the blowdown,” said Jim Sanders, supervisor of the Superior National Forest, which manages the BWCA.
Other key preparations include the state of Minnesota’s purchase of two water-bombing aircraft, which were used last year to stop the Alpine Lake fire from reaching the Gunflint Trail.
In addition, many property owners along the trail have installed outdoor sprinkler systems and cleared brush and dead trees from around their properties, and the Gunflint Trail Fire Department has used grants to purchase better equipment and devise extensive evacuation plans.
4 square miles estimated to be burning in the Boundary Waters Conoe Area Wilderness on Sunday.
More than 20 square miles burning by Monday night.
ABOUT THE BLOWDOWN
- On July 4, 1999, a series of thunderstorms tore through the Superior National Forest in northeastern Minnesota. There were 90 m.p.h. winds that damaged about a half-million acres of land, about 780 square miles, from near Ely to the end of Gunflint Trail north of Grand Marais. About 25 people were injured and forest specialists have spent the years since dealing with the 25 million downed trees from the storm.
- Since the blowdown, the U.S. Forest Service and Minnesota Department of Natural Resources have done some controlled burning in the region, with a goal of minimizing the damage that could be caused by a fire, such as the one currently burning.
- More information about the blowdown and its aftermath is available at www.startribune.com/a1532 and www.startribune.com/a1533.