Trail Time – Fire Season Prep
It’s a beautiful day on the Gunflint Trail, round puffy clouds are scudding across the sky; there’s a good breeze whipping up whitecaps on the lake. It’s the kind of breeze I always loved paddling into on my Boundary Waters and Quetico canoe trips of years past. I love leaning in to a good wind. It’s invigorating, especially if you’re paddling in the bow.
We’ve all been busy preparing for the summer season, residents and lodge owners alike. Last week was the Gunflint Cleanup, where volunteers walk all sixty miles of the Trail picking up trash. All those who registered got T-shirts and lunch and listened to a couple of presentations by Friends of the Boundary Waters and another group called Let’s Plant Trees. They gave out free seedlings at the event— sugar maple, yellow birch, cedar and pine among others. There was also a tree-planting activity near Flour Lake afterwards. The Gunflint Cleanup is a great family event, led by Andrea Hofeldt of Loon Lake Lodge, who makes it fun with games for kids of all ages. The segment of the Trail that Roepke’s Rangers and the Trail Ratz cleaned was remarkably free of litter and debris compared to other years. Good going, people!
It looks so green now, it’s hard to believe that it was very dry this spring. Even though we had a big rain of more than three inches in May, after that our wildfire danger got to the “very high” level. Then last week we watched on radar as two storm systems approached and then veered off without a drop of rain falling on the Gunflint Trail area. Things were getting very crunchy underfoot.
After the storms missed — one squeaked by to the south and the other passed us to the north — Lars and I decide to run our wildfire sprinkler system to help create what is called a “defensible green zone.” In theory, a hot blazing wildfire “skips over” these moist areas and continues searching for dry fuel elsewhere. In fact, that is exactly what happened to cabins and homes on the upper Gunflint Trail during the Ham Lake fire. Many homes and 75,000 acres were destroyed here and in Canada. But where the sprinkler systems worked, they were successful in turning the fire away. As part of guarding against wildfire, many home and cabin owners practice Firewise, a program that calls for the removal of potential fuel around buildings. A sprinkler system in addition to this practice further inhibits fire from spreading. By fuel, I don’t mean gasoline. I mean flammable forest materials. It could be dead wood, dry grass or dead lower limbs on trees, among other things.
Keeping fuel away from a home in the middle of the woods is not something you do once and then rest on your laurels. Trees and plants are growing all the time: when a tree is green it’s not an issue so much if we’re talking about deciduous trees. But some conifers, like the Balsam Fir, are incredibly flammable even when they’re green. The moisture content of the forest floor plays an important part too. Dry duff — what’s underfoot when you walk through the woods — can be incendiary. Peat fires can burn underground for an amazingly long time: weeks, months, even years in the right conditions. Guarding against potential wildfire is an ongoing project.
It is amazing to me just how fast trees and shrubs grow in the spring and how ready they are to horn in on our cleared areas. I remember Lars reading “The World Without Us,” a book about how fast nature would take over civilization if all the humans were to suddenly disappear. The author concluded that it would take 500 years for residential neighborhoods to become forested. It feels like it would take about five minutes here. Everything is so ready to grow!
Preparing for fire season is one thing; the reality of living in a wildfire danger zone is another. During dry spells the fear of fire grows within us each day without rain. It becomes an insidious kind of stress, so when the rain did come last week — well, it’s hard to describe but mainly I felt HUGE relief. My shoulders migrated down toward the ground and I felt like whistling. We feel it bodily — both the drought and then the relief; The rain brings reprieve, promise, hope, but especially WATER. The birds sing once more, the frogs get happy, the air smells sweeter and life looks grand again.
And now I am ready to enjoy a summer of canoeing and fishing and cooking out and swimming — well, I might put a hold on swimming for now. The water in Gunflint Lake was at 48 degrees today. But it sure was beautiful.
— Marcia Roepke
