MPR’s Stepanie Hemphil visits the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to see the landscape a decade after devasting blowdown. Ten years after millions of trees blew down in Minnesota's pristine Boundary Waters Wilderness, the forest is in the midst of a comeback. Segment includes recollections from guide who experienced storm first hand.
It was July 4th, 1999 when a huge storm roared across the remote woods, terrifying campers and trapping them in a tangle of uprooted trees that blocked their way out.
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STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: These days you have to do a little work to see the blowdown. At Moose Lake, northwest of Ely, the horizon is scraggly. A few tall trees, some still alive, some dead, stand above a thick mass of new trees. The young dogwoods, balsam fir, and maples crowd against us as we tramp the rocky portage. Nothing here hints of a disastrous windstorm until we turn off the portage and start crashing through the brush. That's when the blowdown hits you.
So we're jumping over downed trunks that have been lying here for 10 years. And some of them are breaking as we step on them.
We reach the top of a high outcrop of rock and gain a great view of Moose Lake. It's cloudy and cool, and the wind is whispering a little reminder of what it was like here 10 years ago. Our guide is John Pierce, a recreation planner for the US Forest Service. On that July 4, he was fishing with friends on Basswood Lake. When it started to rain they tried to set up a tarp, but the wind kept ripping it out of their hands.
JOHN PIERCE: Couldn't see very far. You could probably only see about 20 to 25 feet because there was so much both water and pine needle sticks, everything in the air blowing. And we could also see the trees that were upwind of us were all leaning right over us at a very scary angle. And we all just ran. There was no time to talk or coordinate or think.
STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: A couple of years earlier, Pierce had done some thinking about what he would do in this kind of situation. He'd helped some campers who had been injured by falling trees. He decided then the safest place might be the lakeshore, because the wind would come off the lake pushing the trees down inland, away from the shore. So that's what he did 10 years ago. He ran straight into the wind. It was ripping the trees right out of the ground, roots and all.
JOHN PIERCE: I knew it was a flat run to the lakeshore. But for some reason I was running uphill. And what I was running up was this rootwad that was coming up as I was running, and so the rootwad actually tossed me backwards, and I landed on my feet and had to run around the rootwad and then get to the shore. And I hid behind another big stump of a tree that had gone down.
STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: He waited there between the uprooted tree and the lake. The wind whipped the waves six feet high, and the air was full of debris, and it was all coming at him at 90 miles an hour. Then suddenly it was over.
JOHN PIERCE: The storm passed and the sun came out. There wasn't a cloud in the sky.
STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: They salvaged their boat and trawled around Basswood Lake to check out the damage. They helped some other campers. One of them had a broken leg. Pierce didn't know it at the time, but this was a huge storm. It started near Fargo, North Dakota, killed some people in Canada, roared off the Eastern Seaboard into the Atlantic, curved back to shore, and ended two days later in the Gulf of Mexico.
In the Boundary Waters, the damage was almost unbelievable. In a swath 30 miles long and between four and 12 miles wide, it knocked down millions of trees, jumping and bucking across the ridges and leaving some pockets of land strangely untouched. John Pierce and the rest of the Forest Service spent the next two weeks helping campers trapped by the tree trunks that lay in a huge, impenetrable tangle. There were head injuries, broken arms and legs, but not a single person died in the Boundary Waters.
And of course, the wilderness didn't die either, but it has changed a lot. What you see in some of the blowdown areas now is a forest that experts expected to see 50 years from now. Ecologist Lee Frelich says the evolution of the forest leaped ahead because of the blowdown. 10 years ago under the big old pines, another generation of trees was coming up, ready to take over as the pines slowly died off.
LEE FRELICH: In this case the wind came and wiped out the old pine forest in a few minutes, and they were able to start taking over immediately because they were small seedlings on the forest floor.
STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: And he says they're growing like mad. Frelich says it was sad to see the big old pines go down, but he says in nature, the only constant is change. Stephanie Hemphill, Minnesota Public Radio News, Ely.