THE BWCAW BLOWDOWN ANNIVERSARY
The morning of Sunday, July 4, 1999, started out typically enough
for the people who live near Superior National Forest and the
Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
But within 48 hours, residents, emergency workers and volunteers
from three counties and state and federal governments were in for
what many will remember as the event of their lifetimes.
Five years later, those who experienced the Independence Day storm
are reflecting on how it has changed the forest landscape and their
lives. With some help from the U.S. Forest Service, the wilderness
continues to heal.
While saplings fill the voids created by devastating winds, the
memories of those who witnessed the power of nature remain vivid.
On that Sunday morning five years ago, Dave Seaton, the owner of
Hungry Jack Outfitters off the Gunflint Trail, had just sent a few
groups of campers on trips into the wilderness.
Nothing seemed exceptional about the weather. Thunderstorms can be
daily occurrences in the region during summer and fall, so Seaton
thought little about the gusting winds and steadily darkening skies.
By 1 p.m. the sky and Seaton's outlook changed dramatically.
"The sky did that green thing," Seaton said. "And we realized it was
going to be a little different."
In nearby Grand Marais, at Cook County's emergency communications
center, a message was about to come across the wire from the
National Weather Service warning that a large storm system with
strong winds was barreling down on the region. The radio dispatcher
logged the message at 1:07 p.m.
Four minutes later, emergency calls would begin streaming into the
communications center. Residents were requesting help and reporting
large numbers of downed trees, blocked roads and flooding. Wind
speeds were later estimated at more than 100 mph, strong enough to
lift the bunkhouse walls from the floorboards at Seaton's outfitting
business.
One cabin guest was frantically trying to sop up the deluge on the
floor with a towel when Seaton looked in on him. "And he asks me --
'You guys get storms like this all the time around here?' " Seaton
said.
In reality, a storm like the one that descended that day comes only
once every 500 years, according to weather scientists and Forest
Service officials.
Trees were beginning to snap off and fall because of the wind. Soon
the pager Seaton carries as a volunteer firefighter went off.
The guest of a nearby resort, out walking with his wife, had been
hit by a falling tree. The man's chest had been nearly crushed and
one leg broken in several places. "He just got squashed," Seaton
said.
The resort guest helped by Seaton and his neighbors and friends was
among at least 60 who sustained storm-related injuries. At least 20
required air evacuation and were flown by Forest Service float plane
before being transported by local rescue workers to regional trauma
centers or hospital emergency rooms.
For all those who were injured, hundreds more escaped unscathed -- a
fact that still amazes Forest Service rescue personnel such as
Ely-based float plane pilot Patrick Loe. Almost miraculously, no one
was killed.
"My first thought when I saw it from the air was that we were going
to have hundreds of casualties," Loe said. The Forest Service
estimates that about 4,000 people were in the area when the storm
hit.
Uninjured campers, many deep in the wilderness, faced a grueling
trek through a maze of downed and tangled trees.
The already challenging overland portages, the trails that campers
use to carry their gear and canoes by foot from lake to lake, had
essentially become extreme obstacle courses. From the air, Loe saw
campers pushing canoes vertically over or horizontally under the
tangle of trees blocking portages.
"The portages were pretty much wiped out," Loe said.
As it was happening, many believed the storm was occurring locally
and had little understanding that it was knocking down trees and
creating mayhem along a 130-mile stretch of forest running from west
of Ely in St. Louis County and tracking northeast through Lake and
Cook counties and into Canada.
An estimated 477,000 acres of forest were damaged during the 20
minutes it took the storm and its winds to roar through the region.
About the time Seaton was checking on his guests, Joel Rice, a
counselor with YMCA Camp Widjiwagan, were hunkering down in a tent
with five 13-year-olds at a campsite on Saganaga Lake. A falling
Norway pine narrowly missed the tent, but its giant trunk and
uprooted base was now providing shelter from the wind for the
campers.
Rice, 20 at the time, said his main focus was keeping his charges as
safe as possible and staying calm. "I just kept thinking that if I
freak out, they are going to be a whole lot harder to deal with,"
Rice said. "So I read them a story for the next hour while
everything went to hell." The story of the Princess Bride held the
campers' attention.
"At first I didn't think of it in the bigger picture," Rice said. "I
thought I picked the one campground in the Boundary Waters that just
got hit hard."
Back at Seaton's outfitting business, he and about 20 others were
also beginning to realize the extent of the damage as they went to
work with chain saws, clearing trees from the mile-and-a-half
driveway leading to Hungry Jack Road. The work would take nearly
nine hours.
The calls at the Cook County communications center continued for two
days, sometimes coming so frequently that dispatchers had difficulty
keeping phone logs.
"I had dispatchers working six-hour shifts and it was taking them
roughly another six hours to catch up on their paperwork," Cook
County Sheriff Dave Wirt said. "It built over 24 hours, and then we
realized we had whole regions that couldn't even call us."
By the end of day two, county, state and federal governments began a
coordinated search-and-rescue effort that would continue for two
weeks. Forest Service workers and volunteers also cleared portage
trails and worked to make campsites safe as they checked the welfare
of those in the wilderness.
Slowly, a semblance of order was restored to the network of trails
that link the lakes of the Boundary Waters. The Forest Service
turned its attention to preventing wildfires that, fueled by the
fallen timber, could easily sweep into populated areas outside the
wilderness.
GROWTH AND RECOVERY
For those who live year-round in the region and depend on the forest
for their livings, the breadth of the damage was emotionally
painful, said Deb Benedict, who owns a home and about 40 acres of
forestland near Seagull Lake.
"It was very, very traumatic and depressing," Benedict said. "Many
of us bought our places for what was there, and then we had this."
The changed landscape and the simple realization of the physical
labor needed to clear the fallen trees was enough to depress people,
Seaton said.
"The change and the sense of loss was very emotionally difficult for
me," he said. That, coupled with the new threat of an uncontrolled
wildfire and the impact it was having on business, compounded the
sense of loss, Seaton said.
In 2000, the Forest Service issued 2,100 fewer permits for entering
the BWCAW than it did in 1999.
"The first summer after the storm, our business was way down,"
Seaton said. "We were calling our regulars and hearing they were
afraid to come up. 'We are all going to die in a flaming inferno.'
That's what they thought."
Others said business only dipped during the first month after the
storm hit, picking up again in September.
By 2001, permits were only down from 1999 by 1,100 and in 2002 only
700 fewer permits were issued. Forest Service officials are hesitant
to say the drop can be directly related to storm damage or the fear
of fire. Historically, numbers of permits have waxed and waned and
might be attributed to many things, including the economy, the price
of gasoline and weather, said Barb Soderberg, a Forest Service
spokeswoman.
Seaton's business has since rebounded and, like others, he found his
own way of dealing with the loss. A former guitar-maker, he decided
to build a guitar from some of the downed timber. Using aspen and
spruce, he crafted a six-stringer he dubbed "The Ghost."
"I wanted to take something negative and make something good out of
it," Seaton said. "I wanted to save some of this wood and try to
make something beautiful from it."
Benedict's partner, Jim Raml, a self-taught forest ecologist, saw
the storm and the way it changed the forest as an opportunity to
start restoring species of trees to their land. Those species
included white, red and jack pine as well as upland black spruce
that have been slowly disappearing from Minnesota's landscape from
logging, disease or insect invasion.
Raml is among dissenters who feel the Forest Service missed an
opportunity to do the same thing on a forestwide basis. Planting
between 2,000 to 3,000 trees and managing his and Benedict's land
carefully, Raml hopes to create a diverse forest with trees of
varying ages and species that could better recover naturally from a
future weather event, insect infestation or outbreak of disease.
Although he won't live to see the end results of his work, Raml said
the process has been therapeutic for him.
The Forest Service officials recognize that not everyone will agree
with the way they've managed all parts of the wilderness and the
forest after the storm, but they also say the concept of wilderness
requires limited human intervention.
The primary goal remains protecting civilized areas on the edge of
the wilderness from fire, said Dennis Neitzke, the Gunflint District
ranger for the Superior National Forest.
Neitzke acknowledges the resiliency of the people who live near the
forest and said he remains sensitive to the impact the storm and its
aftermath have had on their lives.
For him, the storm is a highlight of a 27-year career, and a career
he chose. "We get to do," he said of the Forest Service. "The people
who live there have to do."
THE WILDERNESS TODAY
Five years have passed since the National Weather Service issued its
warning of a storm that in less than an hour would reshape lives and
a landscape. But Wednesday morning, two boys from Appleton, Wis.,
were oblivious to history as they splashed and goofed in the stream
that flows from Duncan Lake to Rose Lake in the BWCAW.
With a group of YMCA campers, Peter Abraham, 14, and Ben Matuszak,
13, were enjoying the cooling water after the hard, steep portage
between the lakes.
Peter's father, Pete Abraham, a chaperone and naturalist for the
trip, said he traveled the wilderness as a boy 30 years ago. The
effects of the storm on the wilderness would be a part of his
instruction, and they planned to visit parts of the forest still
littered with downed trees.
"I'm going to use it as a teaching moment," Pete Abraham said. "I
look at it as a part of the experience and part of the natural
environment that couldn't be controlled by human beings." The
storm's effects will enhance rather than diminish the group's
wilderness experience, he said.
Others in the wilderness area, some for the first time, said the
damage was nearly imperceptible. "I just thought it was going to be
worse. The way people back in Nebraska were talking there weren't
any trees left," said Bill Curry of Lincoln, Neb.
"I wondered about that," said Jim Lahn, of Hinton, Iowa, when a
section of storm-damaged forest was pointed out to him. "It hasn't
diminished our experience at all."
At a campsite on Duncan Lake, just inside the wilderness area, Angel
Malenke of Little Falls, Minn., said she has only been to the BWCAW
since the 1999 storm.
With her two daughters, two sons and a family friend, Malenke's goal
was to paddle into Canadian waters unaided by an adult male.
"We want to say we made it all the way to Canada without the help of
a man," she said.
For Malenke, the storm damage was a part of the natural experience.
She also said it made finding firewood that much easier. Another
bonus was that new openings in the forest canopy had allowed more
forest plants and flowers to flourish, Malenke said. The primitive
outside toilet at her campsite was surrounded by wildflowers.
"There's a little green growing up, just enough so you feel like
nobody is going to notice you," she said. "But talk about a view. I
don't know what it looked like before, but I'm guessing it has got
to be an improvement, ya know?"
Linda Cook, 65, and Gretchen Lindgren, 56, were entering the
wilderness at Duncan Lake for a day trip to Rose Lake on Wednesday.
The important thing about the wilderness, they said, is that it
remains as wild as possible. The storm damage only adds to the
respect for nature people gain from traveling in the wilderness,
said Lindgren of St. Cloud, Minn.
"In some ways, it makes the experience more awesome," Lindgren said
of the storm damage. "You are awed by what can happen in the natural
world. It doesn't change the overall experience because you can
always find something here to love."
After coaxing her golden retriever, Buster, aboard, Lindgren
launched the canoe and she and Cook paddled toward the horizon.
