Boreal B[l]og

We pulled up to an empty campsite on Knife Lake, just east of the Eddy Lake portage, and I hopped
out of the canoe to check it. Seasonal ranger Mark Ringlever and I were doing an eight-day circle of the Kawishiwi District, checking permits and campsites, talking to people, picking up litter, digging new latrines, and covering old ones, but basically a long canoe trip into deep wilderness with Mark’s being paid to do it. Knife Lake is a large, beautiful border lake with many arms, clear water, and is featured often in northland wilderness writer Sig Olson’s books. Earlier that day, we came upon a
group of seven young women with an older man leading the trip. Mark said to the man, “Wow, I want your job.” The man’s reply was, “Wow, I want yours.”

At the Knife Lake site, I saw something I vividly remember three decades later: a fire’s burning in the woodpile just outside the fire grate, flames four feet high, fed by the wind, about to reach a grassy area and trees nearby. Fire inside a fire grate is almost friendly; fire outside the grate, burning uncontrolled, is scary.

We each used our shovel and Pulaski, threw some burning wood into the lake, and used some of our pots to put water on it until the fire was finally out. Had the summer been drier, this fire could have been off to the races. There would be no Knife Lake Fire this year—we continued our trip uneventfully. Later that summer, I did a trip on the Kawishiwi River and fully a third of the sites we visited had outright active fires or warm ashes.

I learned years ago that a campfire will burn itself out overnight. We left camps that way. We know now that fire can spread through duff underground and reappear on the surface. I put my fires dead out which I define as when deep ashes are cold to my bare fingers.

Five years after the Knife Lake incident, I was a volunteer helping Mike Manlove, another ranger. We paddled into Good Lake, and at the first of two campsites on the lake there was a tent up, nobody there, and a fire burning. The leader of the trip, a guide, returned while we were there. As Mike wrote him a $100 ticket for an unattended fire, the man was upset, embarrassed, and apologized, saying he had spent over four hundred nights in the Boundary Waters and nothing like this had ever happened. I wonder how many fires he had left unattended during that time.

Mike told me a story about a Forest Service employee’s arrival by power boat at a recently used campsite on Basswood Lake where the fire was still burning. (The Wilderness Act allowed up to 25 hp motors on part of Basswood as a compromise.) He saw the culprits’ canoes out on the lake and chased them down, ordering them to return to the site to put the fire out. The campers worked in law enforcement in south
Florida. As the employee wrote the ticket, one of the Floridians asked whether there would be professional courtesy, you know, one cop to another.

The Forest Service employee responded, “What would you do if you caught me running coke down in Dade?”
“We’d bust your —. We deal with drug running real seriously down there. It’s costly.”
“Well, we deal with unattended fire real seriously up here. It’s costly.”

The 2007 Ham Lake fire in the Boundary Waters began when a man burned garbage, convenient but illegal (air pollution), and did not put the fire fully out. Seventy thousand acres and over 150 buildings were burned, valued at $10 million, another $11 million spent to control it. Cary Griffith wrote in Gunflint Burning of the effort to control the fire and the tragedy that followed. It is a powerful story.

This entry was posted on July 22, 2024 at 12:08 and is filed under UNPUBLISHED OUTDOOR WRITING. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.