MPR’s Lorna Benson talks with Marlin Bree, a boater who was among a few unlucky people caught on Lake Superior when hundred-mile-an-hour winds whipped up 30-foot waves on July 4, 1999. The storm on Lake Superior was connected to the massive blowdown in the BWCA.

Early in the morning of July 4th, Bree launched his small hand-made boat “Persistence" from Grand Portage. He had been waiting there for several days hoping the fog would clear, finally lifting on that morning. Bree says it looked like good sailing weather and the forecast was calling for the hottest day of the year.

The Boundary Waters–Canadian Derecho (also called the Boundary Waters Blowdown), produced straight-line winds of up to 100 mph, which uprooted and toppled nearly 500,000 acres of the BWCA's trees in a massive blowdown. It began in Fargo mid-morning on July 4, 1999, and plowed at a northeasterly angle across the state. It mowed across northeastern Minnesota, crossed into Canada, and fizzled out in Maine the following morning, traveling 1,300 miles and lasting 22 hours.