Blowdown in the Boundary Waters
On 07/04/1999 in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a bizarre confluence of meteorological events resulted in the most damaging blowdown in the region's history. Mid summer windstorm developed amid unusually high heat and water saturated forests and moved steadily east, bearing down on Fargo, North Dakota and damaging land as it crossed the Minnesota border. The book Gunflint Falling Blowdown in the Boundary Waters by Carrie Griffith tells the story of this devastating storm.
Cary Griffith:Good morning, everybody, and thanks for listening in. And thanks to my esteemed colleagues in this, my invitees, Peter Leschak Leschak and Lee Froelich. Today, we're just gonna talk briefly about the book, Gun Flint, Falling, Blow Down in the Boundary Waters. I'm gonna talk a little bit about how I came to write the book, but most of this is gonna be a free flowing conversation between Lee and Peter answering questions that I have. I have about 11 questions that I'd love to get their input in about the blowdown that happened on 07/04/1999 in the Boundary Waters.
Cary Griffith:I actually look at this book, Gunflint Falling, as a prequel to my last nonfiction book I published called Gunflint Burning Fire in the Boundary Waters. That book was about the Ham Lake Fire of two thousand seven. The reason I call this a prequel is because when I was interviewing people for that book and talking to Lee and Peter as well, well, first of all, they told me that one of the reasons that the Ham Lake fire of two thousand seven burned as hot and intense as it did was because of all the blowdown from that 07/04/1999 episode, that Duray show. Then when I started talking to people about the fire, a lot of them would tell me these really dramatic stories about what happened to them in the blowdown. And I and I'm drawn to drama, especially drama in the wilderness.
Cary Griffith:And so I thought it would be really compelling to write a book about this, and that's pretty much what I've done. I've written a book featuring some of the people that were stuck, the search and rescue, the recovery. And in doing that, I reached out to both Peter and Lee. And I actually have sections in the book in which I introduce Peter and Lee. I was going to read those from each chapter and let them comment on their own, how I described them, if they want to add anything to it.
Cary Griffith:Let's start with Peter. This is from chapter seven, which is really towards the end of the book. When I was having trouble trying to ferret out all the details of the meteorological things that went into creating that profound windstorm that happened that day, the derecho. I'll tell you, I had a hard time deciphering all the all the jargon and stuff. And Peter is a real aficionado and a watcher of the weather, and when I talked to him about it, he put it in terms that I could kind of understand.
Cary Griffith:And I wrote up his comments in chapter 37 called bow echoes, meso scales, derechos, and more. He was really helpful. But here's how I introduced Peter, the one paragraph in that chapter. Peter Leschack, who for thirty years was chief of the French Township Fire Department inside Lake Minnesota, has long been a student of the weather, particularly in Northern Minnesota. He has worked in a variety of wildfire related capacities and held positions of leadership in the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the US Forest Service.
Cary Griffith:He has written 10 books and countless journal, newspaper, and magazine articles. As someone who worked intensively on the 07/04/1999 blowdown cleanup, he recognizes the important role Weathers played in that event, as well as many others. Now on to Lee Froelich, the esteemed forestry professor from the University of Minnesota. I interviewed Lee early on when I was writing this book, and I actually wrote a chapter that I wanted to get into the book. And then when I started writing the book and interviewing people, the book took a slightly different trajectory.
Cary Griffith:But I really like Lee's perspective on the boreal forest and the storm and that particular storm, the July '9 storm, I added it as an addendum called Wind, Fire, and Warming. And in that addendum, I introduced Lee, and this is how I describe him. After acquiring his PhD in forest ecology from the University of Wisconsin Madison in 1986, he wasted little time rising to the top of his class. According to his brief bio, he is listed among the top 1% of all scientists in the world in the Web of Science, Ecology, and Environment category. He has authored more than 200 publications with two eighty seven co authors from 26 countries.
Cary Griffith:His publishers include Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press. When it comes to talking publicly about his research interests, including forest fires, wind, earthworm invasion, climate change, and related topics, he is frequently interviewed by and quoted in the popular media, including The New York Times, Newsweek, CBS Radio's, The Osgood Files, and The Washington Post. Now when I was, writing the book, many questions occurred to me. And then when I was reading the proof of the book for the University of Minnesota Press, I thought of some additional questions, and I was really kind of intrigued. I hadn't circled back with Lee or Peter, and I was really curious about their answer to several questions I had.
Cary Griffith:So the first question is, I was really curious what each of you were doing the day of 07/04/1999. That's the day the the derecho blew through the boundary waters and felled 48,000,000 trees. What were you doing on the day before and the day of the storm? Because I I had some people tell me, you know, I had a predilection there was gonna be a storm or
Peter Leschak:that kind of thing. So I'm curious if you guys did too. And when did you each first hear about the blowdown? And when you heard about it, what were your first impressions? Okay.
Peter Leschak:Well, I first heard about it almost instantly because we were affected by Inside Lake. And my fire department pager went off probably just about the same time that a lot of pagers went off across Northeastern Minnesota. And so, we had, like, 18 power lines down Inside Lake. We were on the southern fringe of it. You know, it didn't seem particularly out of the ordinary.
Peter Leschak:You know, we've had many storms roll through, a lot of down microbursts and stuff over the years. But when I turned on my radio, my handheld radio to respond to the first page, I started picking up some very strange radio traffic, some very alarming radio traffic. All these things were going down to the north. There was boats capsized on Lake Vermillion. There was a house burning somewhere up in that area.
Peter Leschak:I heard a Forest Service colleague of mine come up on the air saying that he was trying to respond, but he was trapped because his driveway was completely blocked by trees. And it went on and on, and I'm listening to this traffic as we're responding to our own issues, and I'm thinking, man, something big has happened. Little did I know how big.
Cary Griffith:So just to clarify, Side Lake is just south of where the the major part of the storm blew through?
Peter Leschak:I would say because the very next day, I was I was dispatched, not to the Boundary Waters, but to the d the DNR. My phone rang for my DNR boss. And we went up to the Valley River Road, which is a state forest road, which is approximately as the crow flies, I would say 15 miles north of Side Lake. And that was as bad as anything that happened in the Boundary Waters. So, you know, we got sort of the edge of it.
Peter Leschak:And then when I saw what had happened, and actually, they had sent us up there because there was a family trapped at a campsite. Their truck had been crushed by a tree. The father husband had hiked several miles to the, nearest tavern to report that they were uninjured, but they were trapped. And it took us eight hours to get there with two dozers and three chainsaws. And it took us eight hours to get down the Valley River Road and get these people rescued, and I thought, wow.
Peter Leschak:This I have not seen before.
Cary Griffith:I heard so many stories like that. That was that was really compelling. Lee, what about you?
Lee Frelich:Well, I did think there would be a big storm of some sort because of the extreme humidity that had been pulled up from the Gulf Of Mexico, and usually those big heat waves end with a big storm of some sort. I was actually in my living room in my condo in Downtown Minneapolis, and I knew almost immediately because I was watching The Weather Channel when I saw the weather watches go up and I saw the Doppler radar image of the bow echo Duratio go across the boundary water, so I knew that something big had happened. Of course, it was several hours before I heard the reports from people who were there on the ground. And when I heard that, I thought, well, this is very similar to what happened on 07/04/1977 in Northern Wisconsin with the big blowdown that went from Park Falls all the way over to Rhinelander. In fact, the sizes of the two and the maximum wind speeds they have are almost identical, and they both occurred around noon on different fourths of Julys.
Lee Frelich:So that was my initial thought. I didn't get up there until a couple weeks later because I wanted to stay out of the way of the emergency efforts. So I went up there to see what had happened to my forest plots that used to be old growth, and, of course, they were no longer old growth. I think that's, pretty much my initial response.
Cary Griffith:Yeah. You know, that's really interesting. As part of this, I did some research on derechos in the Upper Midwest, and I think I found four or six that were happened on the July 4 and several that happened very close to the July 4. That's sort of the sweet spot for those derechos to happen. When you finally got on the scene, I know it's a little different for both of you, but I'm still curious.
Cary Griffith:Peter, the next day, the fifth, you were up in that state forest, but I wanna say it was the next day, the set the day after the fifth of sixth. Was that when you were called up to go into the heart of the Boundary Waters?
Peter Leschak:Well, you know, I was dispatched up to the seaplane base at Shagua Lake in Ely to tie in with a team. We were sending out saw teams, six person teams, and so, I got to the seaplane dock at Shagua and met my team, which was they were all female. We, loaded up. I didn't see the first impact from the air until the beaver lifted off and and took us into, Cummings Lake, I believe it was. And from the air, it was astounding.
Peter Leschak:And later on the next year, I was assigned, to a helicopter up in Grand Marais and we took several people on blowdown tours. So the best thing is to describe that. I sort of patented my blowdown tour for all the VIPs. We would lift off of Grand Marais, airport, CKC. At 4,000 feet AGL, above ground level, we would park the helicopter in a hover about the middle of Knife Lake.
Peter Leschak:And you would look to your left. The the nose of the ship is pointing north. Out the left side, you could see all the way to Ely. Out the right side, you could see all the way to Lake Superior. And below you, all the trees were flat.
Peter Leschak:I mean, virtually, almost all of the trees were flat and all pointed in one direction. And it it was as if this huge divine or diabolical hand had come through and just flattened everything. And I got my first taste of that when we lifted off of Shaguar in the beaver and headed to where we were going to be, put to work.
Cary Griffith:And and all the trees, when you say, I use a similar description, it seemed like a big hand. They were all laying the same way, weren't they? From more or less from west to east?
Peter Leschak:Pretty much, you know, and that was the astounding thing. And there were a few pockets where it looks like there may have been a little bit of a, a twisting motion and, I don't know if there had been a microburst there or what, but by and large, yes, it was a straight line wind that flattened them all, all pointing in the same direction.
Cary Griffith:And, Lee, anything? I mean, you didn't get up there until two weeks later, so the forest service had many, many crews had already been in and were doing work in there, but I have to believe it was still looked awful.
Lee Frelich:Yeah. It did. I had prior experience, you know, with the Wisconsin Duratio, so I I knew how bad it was probably gonna be. And as I tell my students today, my my research project on old growth forest became a research project on blown down forest, and then it later burned. And then it became a project on blown down and burned for us.
Lee Frelich:So, everything is interesting to scientists, I guess. We made do with what happened and because the response of the forest to all these different things that were happening, The blowdown the blowdown followed by fire were all incredibly interesting, so we just kept on with our research. Some of those forests that were on the ridge tops between seagull and alpine lakes and places like that, I had never seen a forest quite that flat in my life. Just so amazing that everything could be squished down to the ground like that.
Cary Griffith:Yeah. You know, one of the things I was most amazed about, and I'd be curious in your initial reactions when you first got on the scene, amazingly, no one died in the Boundary Waters. I think when I did research with the book and interviewed people, it's hard to estimate how many people were actually there on July 4. But the estimates I heard were approximately 10,000 people were in the woods that day in the EWCAW. What struck me the most is you guys describing that landscape as those huge trees all falling in one direction, and there were no fatalities.
Cary Griffith:I mean, when you both got there, did you think that that there were going to be some fatalities, Peter?
Peter Leschak:Oh, yeah. We were briefed before we went in to, basically expect it. And, when I had seen what we, what we were dealing with from the air, and then when we actually started cutting our way through the portages and into the campsites, I fully expected that someone, maybe not where we were, but someone would be found dead. And the fact that no one was is is still astonishing.
Cary Griffith:Yeah. Lee, anything anything you wanna add?
Lee Frelich:I was absolutely amazed that, yeah, that many trees could fall, and and everybody managed to avoid a fatal strike by a falling tree, especially people who thought that they should take refuge under big trees because they had been there for a longer time. Well, the bigger the tree, the more likely it is to blow down and the the worse its impact when it hits something. Yeah. It was just totally amazing to me that nobody had been killed.
Cary Griffith:Yeah. I mean, I tell the story of some people who were struck by trees in there, but the source service did such a great job with the search and rescue that first twenty four hours that everybody made it out made it out alive.
Peter Leschak:Well, just just to add one thing, Kerry, the other part of that equation is that, you know, we were basically in there cutting blowdown for six weeks and in thirty nine years in the fire service, through car accidents and hurricane recovery and tornado recovery and fires all across North America, that was one of the most dangerous environments I ever entered and worked in. And, we fully expected on the ground that that there could very well be a fatality among the cutters before it was over, and there wasn't.
Cary Griffith:Yeah. That was amazing too. And especially after I interviewed a lot of Forest Service people like you and your colleagues who worked in there, I mean, that was dangerous. You know, let's talk for a sec about how one of those groups unfolded. You alluded to it earlier, and I wanna just say as preface to your comments, that I interviewed a lot of people and I got a lot of stories I wasn't able to put in the book.
Cary Griffith:One of them was this story that you alluded to earlier. I think it was your first group of six or so people. I think it was led by Forest Service colleague Barb Thompson. And you were going in with a group, and I I wonder if you can just tell us that story a little bit.
Peter Leschak:Barb Thompson was the crew leader, and I have worked with Barb and at a high degree of respect. The other four, young they were young women, 19, 20, 20 one years old. They had been working in the wilderness, and my first impression was not good. I thought, oh, man. They are too young.
Peter Leschak:There's too many piercings. There's too many tattoos. But what I quickly realized was that they were hardcore. They had been working in the summer and a couple of it was their second summer on wilderness trail crews, using hand saws and hand tools, which is, you know, is incredibly hard work. Just digging a latrine, a new latrine on in the boundary waters can be a mining operation because there's not that much soil.
Peter Leschak:There's a lot of rock. Cutting blow down with axes and hand saws. And it was interesting because they were all a little bit skeptical of this, this older dude, probably as old as their father's, packing the chainsaw. And of course, there had been debate beforehand. Do we even bring the chainsaws in?
Peter Leschak:And the consensus finally was, and I think it was correct, if we are going to do all of this cutting, if we're gonna open up the hiking trails, open up the portages, open up the campsites, then it is going to be virtually impossible with bucksaws and hand tools and also incredibly dangerous, far more dangerous than the chainsaws. One school of thought said, just leave it alone. Don't cut it in any way. But the decision was made. We're going in with chainsaws.
Peter Leschak:We're gonna open it up. And and these young women who had been doing similar work with hand tools all summer were very skeptical. Well, anyway, one evening around the campfire, you know, and we we we had to bond. We bonded with hard work, and I, you know, I wanted to make some connections. So one night around the campfire, I said, I have a theory of why you have all these piercings and tattoos.
Peter Leschak:And so they give me this skeptical eye, cocked eyebrow, or even rolled eyes. Okay. Go ahead, boomer. What I said was, well, you know, our society does not really have this rite of passage that involves pain and blood. And so I said, you've just kinda made up your own rite of passage with pain and blood, and then so you have all these piercings and tattoos.
Peter Leschak:And they just howl with laughter. And, finally, one of them piped up and said, no, we just do it because it drives our parents crazy. But on our fifth day, and we and we and we did they did work hard. We developed some mutual respect. On the last day, we were waiting for a beaver to come pick us up, fly us out.
Peter Leschak:And I put on my Nomex shirt, and I could feel this stiffness across the back. So I peeled it off, and here, I don't know how long it had been on there, was a piece of duct tape. And written in magic marker, across the duct tape was token mail. And, I just I just got a big kick out of that.
Cary Griffith:Oh, I love that story. I wish I could have included that story in the book. That is such a great story. Thank you for sharing that. Didn't you go straight over to Trout Lake from
Peter Leschak:there? Quite honestly, Kerry, I don't remember where we went, but in any case, you know, then our week was up. We came out. I took a couple of days off and then, went up to Grand Marais and, for another week.
Cary Griffith:You had alluded earlier that you were in there for, like, six straight weeks. I mean, that's how rigorous it was for you and all the other crews. It was pretty steady for through the rest of the summer, wasn't it?
Peter Leschak:It was, you know, and it was brutal work. And quite honestly, six weeks seems like a long time, but everyone was pleasantly surprised that it only took six weeks because the work was unbelievable. You know, when we shifted up to the end of the gun flint, the next week, before we got out on the water again, we were on the, hiking trail. I forget which hiking trail we were on. And I remember the day we got there.
Peter Leschak:And so it was it was a day of threes. We had three chainsaws working three hours to get 300 feet. And when we were done, it was essentially a tunnel through the blowdown. It had walls and roof. It was a tunnel through the blowdown.
Peter Leschak:Now that was a particularly intense section. It's one of those ridge tops that Lee mentioned earlier where it just really got flattened, but it was by no means, out of the ordinary. And so that's that's the amount that's the kind of work it was taking.
Cary Griffith:Yeah. I heard a lot of stories like that. It was really grueling. You know, Ali, you alluded to this earlier that there was the Wisconsin blowdown, very similar, in 1977. When I did research, I found a lot of blowdowns that happened around that time in the summer.
Cary Griffith:That's when weather comes out of the West. But I didn't find a lot of references to blowdowns that happened as far north as the Boundary Waters. And I wonder if you could tell us how unusual that is.
Lee Frelich:I think there have always been some blowdowns in the southern part of the boreal forest type, although I think the frequency has gone way up now as an impact of climate change. I think the kind of the northern limit for these really big, really severe storms is moving north, and there are a lot of big blowdowns in Northern Ontario now. Huge blowdowns of hundreds of thousands of acres or more even up by Lake Nipigon and even north of that, so far north. I think the increasing frequency is related to climate change, and, we just have to expect that that will be a major force in the southern part of the Boreal forest windstorms combined with fires, you know, and that is a very dramatic impact on the forest. It essentially exterminates the conifers, and you end up with all birch and aspen.
Lee Frelich:You know, in Alaska, they're getting birch and aspen because the fires are coming closer together. We're getting birch and aspen because we have so much blow down followed by fire. So all over the world, boreal forests that are coniferous are being converted to birch and aspen for a few different reasons in different regions. And we're in the middle of the continent. We're right near the highest frequency of derechos of any place on the planet here.
Lee Frelich:And the fact that those are extending into the Boreal is a big factor in the dynamics for the whole region from Manitoba all the way over to Quebec now.
Cary Griffith:Wow. I did not know that we were in a place with those kind of intense storms, the highest incidence of them on the planet.
Lee Frelich:Yeah. Well, summer derechos are most frequent in the North Central United States, yeah, of any place on the planet.
Cary Griffith:So I'm curious, Peter. You have been on the ground. Have you seen some of the changes in the forest from climate change? Or and if so, what kinds of changes have you seen?
Peter Leschak:In the forest per se, I would say I haven't yet. But climate change, if anyone doubts it, they can look at my notebooks. You know, what I have noticed and, of course, temperatures, for example. I remember one of the first climate I was an early adopter of the idea of anthropogenic climate change, and, I was convinced by the ice core data coming out of Greenland. But in any case, I'm the sort of compulsive record keeper, and I have weather records that go back for the property we live right now only forty five years, but that's what's really scary because I have seen huge changes.
Peter Leschak:For example, as recently as the early eighties, the, span of time between last spring frost and first fall frost in our yard was ninety days, that was the average. We would generally have the last frost late May, early June, and then the first frost late August, early September. That number is now one hundred and forty days. That is the average now, and that is just since the early eighties. Obviously, that kind of a warming is going to have some impact.
Peter Leschak:Although I have not seen it in the forest itself, I mean, as far as the mix of tree species, the the, you know, things that are going on, But I have noticed it with I am also a birder. I contribute, checklists to eBird, and I have noticed a disruption in migration patterns of birds from my own backyard. It's kinda scary, really.
Cary Griffith:Yeah. That is particularly, you've done that for forty five years, which I find amazing in itself, but, wow, in just forty five years, you've seen those kinds of changes.
Peter Leschak:Well, and not only that, you know, the last several years, and I don't know if it's a permanent pattern, but there's actually up here in Northeastern Minnesota, there has been a seasonal shift. I used to begin cross country skiing, and again, this goes back to late seventies, early eighties, maybe into the nineties. My first day of cross country skiing would generally be the last week in November. Now it wasn't great skiing, used the rock skis, but I could get out there. Now that has shifted almost three weeks into mid December sometimes.
Peter Leschak:On the other hand, the last cross country ski of the season has been pushed into April. And so it's like we are getting a much milder fall. And, of course, talk to the deer hunters the last few years. They're hunting deer in orange t shirts. But then you come into around to April and, still cross country skiing the April.
Peter Leschak:And that has been consistent, I would say, four out of the last six years. So I don't know if that's a permanent trend, but I'm not the only one who has noticed the shift of the seasons.
Cary Griffith:Yeah. That's scary is what it is. You know, the blowdown, as I mentioned before, blew down 48,000,000 trees. And I know from talking to a lot of people that the fear of intense fires was uppermost in everyone's mind. Surprisingly, and Peter, you can probably talk to this a little bit, it didn't really happen until 02/2006 with the Cavity Lake Fire and then the Hamm Lake Fire of 02/2007, Pagami Creek of 02/2011.
Cary Griffith:The big fires did happen, but I wonder if you could talk a little bit about why didn't they happen right away, and is there still a blowdown in the forest from, you know, twenty years ago that could result in some intense fires, both Peter and Lee? Go ahead, Peter. Why don't you start first?
Peter Leschak:Oh, I think part of it, or just from my personal observation, when we were cutting through that stuff, a lot of the trees, even though they were tipped over, were not dead. They were still alive, and I am assuming that some of them remained alive, for years after. I mean, I've had trees, tip over on my own property, and, they stay alive for years, still putting out leaves and all the rest of it. So I think maybe that was part of it that even though the trees were down, they were not curing out. The other part, you know, it took a while, I think, for the fuels be to become available.
Peter Leschak:And then the weather is always a factor. You gotta have the right weather, in the boundary waters. You know, quite often the source of ignition is a lightning strike. It has to hit in the right place at the right time without a lot of rain following on it. So there's a lot of variables.
Peter Leschak:But, you know, probably Lee could give you a better answer to that question.
Lee Frelich:Yeah. I would add that we were supposed to get aerial photos of the blowdown, and, we never got them because the next three or four summers were so cloudy that they never found the right day to take the photos. So I I think it was an unusually rainy period for the next few summers, and that's definitely one reason why the fires didn't come. And, you know, they did do a few prescribed fires, which were typically a thousand to to three or 4,000 acres in size, but they did those when the fire weather wasn't quite as severe as it usually is when you have a wildfire. But, yeah, it it was a very rainy period from our perspective, and so we just didn't get those fires right away.
Lee Frelich:And but when they did come, it was pretty well cured. And by then, by the time those fires did occur, some of the balsam fir that had been little seedlings had grown up to be 10 or 15 feet tall and live balsam fir packed in very densely like that during a severe drought like we had in 02/2006 will burn pretty explosively. That was part of it as well. It was that dense coniferous regeneration that became very flammable when we got into a severe drought situation, especially on the really shallow rocky soils.
Cary Griffith:You you know, you mentioned, Lee, that it sounded like the way the blowdown cured over a period of time diminished its usefulness as burnable fuel. How does that work? Because you'd think it would just dry out and be more combustible.
Lee Frelich:Well, not with the weather we had those first few years. A lot of the the needles, you know, fell off the trees, went down on the ground, decomposed, but there's still a lot of fuel there. It's mostly the branches, the one to three inch diameter branches and the twigs that provide most of the energy in a fire. You might have noticed that really big logs and big standing dead trees are still mostly intact after a fire. It's mostly the branches and twigs that provide the energy to the fire.
Lee Frelich:I'm I'm not surprised that it took place the way it did.
Cary Griffith:You also alluded to prescribed burns. I mean, I think, Peter, you can probably talk to this a little bit having worked for the forest service. Did the blowdown was that when the Forest Service changed their perspective about prescribed burns? Because they they used to not have any prescribed burns. Correct?
Peter Leschak:Oh, no. They they were they were doing some burning in the boundary waters. You know, it's always been somewhat controversial. I think it was the research of Myron Heintzeman showed that pre white settlement, and and, I may be a little squishy on the numbers, but just about every acre of high ground in the boundary waters burned on an average about every hundred and ten years or so. Now, obviously, down in the Tamarack and Spruce Bogs, it was a much longer cycle because fire was very common.
Peter Leschak:And, you know, Native Americans used fire as a tool for a lot of things. Well, then, you know, the European settlers arrived, fire, was a bad thing. Fire was the enemy. Fire was the adversary. And so that average, according to Heinz Lohmann, went from, once every one hundred and ten years to once every 2,000 if you carried it out.
Peter Leschak:And so we needed to put fire on that landscape. And if I recall correctly, a lot of the policy of the Superior National Forest regarding the Boundary Waters matrix was just hoping they would get enough natural fire. You get a lightning strike. And I forget now how many acres a year that they would let burn if possible, if conditions were right, and just let them burn, rather than ignite them. But they were doing some prescribed burning before the blowdown.
Peter Leschak:However, after the blowdown, it was we saw or they saw that it really needed to be ramped up. And I was a part of the 3,000 acre prescribed burn on Seagull. Was it a 3 Mile Island? I I'm trying to remember, what the burn was. And it took, I think we ignited that with, the what we call the ping pong balls, the, plastic sphere dispenser machine.
Peter Leschak:And it took quite a bit of coaxing to get it to go because I remember it was the day was relatively high, relative humidity. And, but once it got burning oh, yeah. It really burned. And, we had set up some, sprinklers to protect some thousand year old cedar that were there. Didn't want those to burn.
Peter Leschak:And as Lee alluded to, is if I recall correctly, the year after that burn, I think it was basically dog hair birch coming up on that site. You know, it had had been conifer, and it looked like it was coming back to birch.
Cary Griffith:Wow. Lee, is that the ones he saved by sprinklers? Don't you think that's the oldest tree in Minnesota?
Lee Frelich:Well, we don't really know for sure. It's a grove of of cedars on the North Side Of 3 Mile Island, and I had, mentioned it to a reporter for the the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, and they gave first page coverage to it, you know, that these cedars could be injured in the prescribed burns, and then the the forest service decided that they should be sprinkled during the burns. But we don't know. I mean, one I cored one of them. It had 550 readable rings.
Lee Frelich:There's another one that I think is much older, but it's hollow. So it can be really hard to date those old trees because you don't always get a complete ring sequence. You know? And some of them probably are over a thousand years old, and we just can't get an accurate ring count.
Cary Griffith:Well, thank you, Peter, for you you must have done that from a boat sucking water out of the lake.
Peter Leschak:Well, actually, I didn't actually do it. We I just was we in the collective sense. At on that 3 Mile Island Fire, I was managing a helicopter that was, trying to keep the fire in check. But when the blowdown burned, when it finally caught, it was pretty impressive.
Lee Frelich:Yep. And we we had a couple of old red pines on 3 Mile Island there that dated to 1595 from Bud Heinzelman's course, and they they were huge trees. They survived the blowdown. Some of them blew down, and there were, like, three of them that survived the blowdown. And I think one was killed in the prescribed burn, and then it got to a point where there was only one left and it got struck by lightning and died from injury by lightning strike a few years later.
Lee Frelich:And so that whole fifteen ninety five cohort of red pines and you know? And that's as long as a red pine lives. They were near the end of their lifespan anyway, but that whole cohort is is gone now as a result of the storm and the burns and the lightning. You know, if you're the only tall tree remaining after the blowdown and the burns, then I guess that tree was much more likely to to attract the lightning.
Cary Griffith:Wow. 400 years old.
Lee Frelich:Yeah.
Cary Griffith:Last question. You know, Peter sort of anecdotally from boots on the ground, but also Lee from science and boots on the ground. When I drive up to the end of the Gunflint Trail, I see sort of the standing charred sentinels of the Ham Lake Fire, but I also see a really rich coniferous forest. And I wanna say that fire happened in 02/2007. When I go up there, those pines are like 20 feet tall and pretty thick.
Cary Griffith:Now I know that locals, around the gun flint flanted a lot of trees, but how do you guys see the forest having come back?
Lee Frelich:Yeah. We just published a paper, in 2022 about the analysis of our 1,100 plots that we have in the Boundary Waters. Over 700 of those were installed right after the blowdown, and then when the fires occurred, we added more. So we had plots that didn't blow down, plots that did blow down, plots that blew down and burned. So the plots that blew down and burned were converted to birch or Aspen.
Lee Frelich:Aspen, if it was a spring fire like Ham Lake, but birch if it was a a late summer fire like Cavity Lake, for example. And the areas that didn't burn are coniferous for us because the shade tolerant conifers like spruce and fir and cedar were released from suppression by the blowdown. And then there are a few year areas, especially in the Ham Lake Fire that receded to Jack Pine and so on, which grows very fast. The Ham Lake Fire is actually very heterogeneous, and that's characteristic of spring fires. So some areas were blow down and some weren't.
Lee Frelich:So you could get birch or mostly aspen, or you might have balsam fir that didn't burn just because it was in a lucky spot on the landscape, and you have some regeneration of the jack pine. But the whole sequence of disturbances on the landscape of as a whole has reduced the amount of conifer and increased the amount of birch and aspen.
Cary Griffith:And that is probably going to be the trend.
Lee Frelich:Yeah. I think that's the start of a trend. And the other trend that we picked up, kind of in response to Peter's comments, a few minutes ago is there's a tiny amount of red maple there at the end of the Gunflint Trail, and we found an increase in the amount of red maple after the blowdown and the burns. But because you started out with almost zero, even though it's like a % increase in the amount of red maple, it's still a tiny part of the landscape, book because book because red maples are supposed to be sensitive to fire, and they're not supposed to regenerate after fire. But we had several plots out of the 1,100 plots that regenerated the red maple after high intensity fire and blowed blow down fuels.
Lee Frelich:There's always a surprise in nature.
Cary Griffith:You gotta rewrite the textbook, Lee.
Lee Frelich:Yeah.
Peter Leschak:Well, that's that's very interesting, Lee, because we did a we did a prescribed burn here inside of Lake. We're talking the nineties now, mid nineties. It was broadcast slash, and it burned intensely. And the idea was site prep for, to replant, the conifers that had been there. And I walked in there in the fall.
Peter Leschak:We did the fire in May. I walked in there in the fall, and it was a carpet of red maple seedlings in
Cary Griffith:there. Oh, wow. Yeah. I wanna just tell you guys thank you so much for agreeing to come on this call. You've been excellent and really informative and really interesting.
Cary Griffith:I love the Boundary Waters. I love that Boreal Forest, and I know you guys have firsthand knowledge of it, and you share that love too. So thank you very much. And thanks to everyone who listened to this.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Gunflint Falling, Blow Down in the Boundary Waters is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.