MPR’s Brett Neely reports on U.S. House passage of bill to swap land inside BWCA. The bill allows Minnesota to give 86,000 acres of school trust lands inside the Boundary Waters Wilderness to the federal government. In exchange, the federal government would give Minnesota lands currently controlled by the Forest Service in the surrounding Superior National Forest.

Before the state of Minnesota was even founded, thousands of acres of land were set aside to generate money for public schools. Many of those lands were eventually sold off, but a large chunk of the remaining land is locked inside the federally-protected Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.