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STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Early in its life, the Cavity Lake Fire roared across Seagull Lake, jumping from island to island and threatening homes and resorts along the Gunflint Trail. Near the end of the trail, firefighters set up their base camp.

Two Forest Service workers hop in a small boat to document the fire and its aftermath. In places, the fire seems to have consumed everything. The trees, the shrubs and wildflowers, the mosses and lichens. Even the soil is black, dry, and crumbly. But these two are looking for life.

Rugged rocks rise from the water. Here and there, a clump of cedars clings to the rocky shore, their needles still green against the black ash dusting the steep hills behind them. Burned snags, limbless trees, the color of charcoal stand in scraggly ranks against the sky. But even here, among the burned jack pines and balsam, biologist Lisa Grover can find signs of life.

LISA GROVER: If you look around, you can see the 20-foot tall trees that took off after the blowdown, and a lot of them still have cones on the top. And those cones are open now, and the seed will fall from them, into the bare soil and germinate.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Ash from the fire will enrich the soil. It's all part of a natural cycle that depends on fire.

LISA GROVER: There's a seed bank in the soil just waiting for a disturbance like this. There's one plant called bicknell's geranium that sprouts after fire, produces flowers the second year, set seed. Those seeds will stay in the soil until the next fire, even if it's 200 years from now.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: And some plants aren't waiting for the next generation. Sedges, plants that look like grasses, are already pushing green shoots through the blackened dirt, and grasshoppers flit everywhere. Our next stop is Three Mile Island, a big island in Seagull Lake. After the 1999 blowdown, when straight line winds flattened millions of trees, the Forest Service purposely burned some areas near homes and resorts. The idea was to reduce the amount of fuel available for a future wildfire. Four years ago, crews set this island on fire. Wilderness Ranger Tim McKenzie says that intentional burn saved the island and the Gunflint resorts from the Cavity Lake Fire.

TIM MCKENZIE: I mean, it was traveling pretty good distances and spotting on these islands. As soon as it hit here, it just laid down. So it could have, if these burns hadn't been in place, it could have just run right up the length of this, and it would have hit the end of the trail with a lot of intensity.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: You can even see the very place where the Cavity Lake Fire stopped. The blowdown fuel was already burned, and the year-old shrubs and trees were too small and green to provide enough fuel to keep the fire going. Lisa Grover surveys the pioneer plants that thrive on disturbed soil.

LISA GROVER: There are a lot of birch trees that have come in, a lot of jack pine, some spruce, fireweed. We also have raspberries, blueberries.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: The animals will be gorging on those berries. Grover saw a moose browsing here just a few days ago. The animals are adapted to fires. Rodents burrow into the ground. Bears, wolves, and moose can walk away from a fire. But Grover says the Cavity Lake Fire moved fast, it probably cut off some animals from their trails. Of course, birds can fly away or take refuge in the water. She does worry about the young eagles still in their nests and unable to fly.

LISA GROVER: We have several eagle nests that fire burned all around, and the trees are still there. The nest is still there. The adult eagles are still here. But it's unlikely that the juveniles in the nest survived the fire.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: But a few minutes later, we stopped the boat to listen to a sound that gladdens Grover's heart. A young eagle screaming for food.

LISA GROVER: Do you see the juvenile?

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: At least one young eagle survived the Cavity Lake Fire. This is fire country. At the northern end of Seagull Lake, we're surrounded by land that's been swept repeatedly by wildfires and recently by prescribed fires, too. These fires start, grow, move, and burn out in a patchwork pattern on the land. Just a year ago, the Alpine Lake Fire burned more than 1,000 acres of blowdown until it ran into a patch called the Roy Lake Fire. This was a fire that burned 30 years ago. And during the blowdown seven years ago, these trees were short enough and flexible enough to survive the windstorm. Tim McKenzie battled the Roy Lake Fire back then 30 years ago. He says just as the Roy Lake Fire stopped this year's Cavity Lake Fire, the Cavity Lake Fire will slow or stop other fires in the future.

TIM MCKENZIE: Other fires that are west of it that have a lot of potential will bump into this. At least for several years, this has robbed them of any sort of fuel.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: And here, where the Roy Lake Fire burned across the land to Seagull Lake 30 years ago is a picture perfect Boundary Waters Portage. Young balsam trees scent the air with their clean Northwoods smell. Young birch and alder lean across the path. Vibrant green surrounds us. Soft moss cushions our footsteps. The air is moist, and the mosquitoes are buzzing. It took 30 years for this community of plants and animals to grow to this point. A generation in human time, less than a blink of an eye for the land. Lisa Grover and Tim McKenzie say the people who paddle through here in the next few years will get an unusual lesson in how nature works.

LISA GROVER: Even though it's heartbreaking in many ways, it's also really fascinating and a good lesson in how the landscape changes.

TIM MCKENZIE: It's very exciting actually because people are used to seeing a snapshot in time, but the landscape that they're used to seeing became that landscape because of this process.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: It's a process that shaped the ecosystem of all of Northeastern Minnesota. The Cavity Lake Fire has burned 30,000 acres. That's less than a tenth of the land hit by the blowdown. And that's less than half the area of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Reporting from Seagull Lake, Stephanie Hemphill, Minnesota Public Radio News.