MPR’s Lorna Benson interviews Cathy Quinn, a crew leader on the eastern end of the Gunflint Trail. She says it may be two years before the clean-up is complete and speaks to the enormity of change to landscape.
Forest service crews are spending their second summer cleaning up Boundary Waters portages and camp sites damaged by last year's blowdown.
SPEAKER 1: You can walk on a campsite that's been hit really hard, or a portage. And it feels a lot like either walking through a really narrow high hallway or like being in a log cabin because after the storm hit last year, we basically just punched a hole through our portages and campsites to make sure that there was nobody in there. And now, we're cutting back all the logs further from the trails and trying to move some of the materials and the brush that's piled up on the sides of the trails, trying to move that back further away. So you don't have that feeling of you're just walking down this log carved out portage or campsite. And I have to be honest, in a lot of situations, it's really difficult to overcome that because there's some spots that are really, really pretty hammered.
SPEAKER 2: So it's a slow process, it sounds like.
SPEAKER 1: Yeah, it is. It's very slow. And-- but like I said, it's gratifying to-- you can make a difference.
It-- I worked on a portage last week and went and just started cutting things back and moving the brush back. And when we were done, we stopped and looked at it. And I thought, boy, that looks really good.
It looks a lot better. We try to minimize the amount of evidence that there has been management within wilderness. We try to reduce that as much as possible.
SPEAKER 2: How do you do that?
SPEAKER 1: By doing things like not trying to expose so many cut logs and so many piles of brush laying around, things like that. And like I said, it's not always easy. But if you stick to it, you can get around it and make those improvements and try and pretend that we're not really there, I guess.
SPEAKER 2: What's been the hardest part of this summer's cleanup?
SPEAKER 1: I think the hardest part with it is still just dealing with the whole fact that it happened. The work isn't hard. It is hard, physically demanding. But I think there's a real healing process that's happening with many of the people who either have never worked here before or have worked here for five or 20 years, whatever the difference is.
We're all still dealing with the fact that this has happened in our back yard. And we face that. And you walk on portages that you used to know by the back of your hand. And now you can be stuck out there, and you wouldn't have the slightest idea where you were because it's so different. It's pretty phenomenal, really. But I think that that's the most difficult thing, is just still trying to grasp the enormity of what happened a year ago today.
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