25 years after Boundary Waters blowdown, a changed forest and vivid memories

The day dawned ominously on July 4, 1999, outside Ely. John Pierce, a wilderness ranger for the Superior National Forest, remembers it being hot and so oppressively humid a thick mist hung in the air.

Pierce had the day off, and went fishing with two friends on Basswood Lake, one of a handful of large lakes in the Boundary Waters where small motorized boats are allowed.

As lunchtime approached, they pulled their boat up to a campsite when a big thunderstorm rolled in. The wind blew so hard they struggled to set up a tarp. Pine needles flew through the air like tiny darts.

“And it’s at that moment that we realized this is something we’ve never seen before,” recalled Pierce, now a recreation planner for the U.S. Forest Service.

So they all took off, in different directions. Pierce ran into the wind, toward the lakeshore, reasoning that was his best chance to stay out of the path of falling trees.

As he sprinted on flat ground past a giant red pine, all of a sudden he noticed he was running uphill. The tree was falling over, and he was on top of the mass of tangled roots that had been holding the tree in the ground.

“It was 20 feet high and it went from horizontal to vertical in probably 10 seconds or less. The whole root ball came up and it made a wall. And it actually tossed me backwards,” Pierce said.

Somehow, he landed on his feet. That’s when he remembered his dog was with him. They ran to the lake and took shelter behind a fallen tree. The wind generated waves on the lake six feet high.

“And for 20 to 30 minutes, I took the full brunt of the wind and the waves. It was kind of like getting blasted by a fire hose,” said Pierce.

And then, suddenly, the storm stopped. Pierce found his friends, who had crawled underneath downed trees that had fallen all around them. They were giddy with adrenaline.

“We started running around on the tops of all these trees, all these massive pine,” said Pierce. “And we just couldn’t believe it. It was just one of those feelings like it’s just incredible that we’re still alive.”

They had no way of knowing it at the time, but they had just survived a massive, rare storm. The derecho, a line of several powerful thunderstorms that combined had the power of a Category 3 or 4 hurricane, mowed down more than 750 square miles of the Superior National Forest.

Straight line winds approaching 100 miles per hour carved a path of destruction four to twelve miles wide. An estimated 48 million trees toppled over or snapped in two.

Miraculously, no one died. “That was really the amazing thing about what happened up there,” said Cary Griffith, author of the recent book “Gunflint Falling: Blowdown in the Boundary Waters.”

Between 3,000 and 4,000 canoeists were in the Boundary Waters at the time. But many had just arrived that day. And because the storm struck around noon, many campers hadn’t arrived at campsites yet, said Nicole Selmer, a wilderness ranger for the Forest Service who supervised a group of volunteers repairing a portage trail on Fourtown Lake, about 12 miles north of Ely, during the blowdown.

“We were literally screaming, because you couldn’t hear each other over the wind,” Selmer recalled.

“I looked up and we were under a bunch of aspen trees. And they have really heavy limbs. And they were all kind of like rotating in one direction, and then they would snap back into the other direction. They were literally going in circles. It’s a memory that is really etched into my mind,” said Selmer.

If she had been in the epicenter of the blowdown, Selmer is convinced no one in her group would have survived.

“All of the large aspen trees that were swirling around us, I think it would have all come down. And we were really, really lucky,” she said.

The following day, Selmer was flown to a lake with another ranger to search for stranded campers.

“It was utter decimation,” she said. No trees were left standing. Campsites that were normally easy to spot from across the lake were covered in a tangled mass of felled trees.

“And when you got to those sites, you were walking on top of trees, trying to see where a fire grate was, or where a latrine was, and you’re really just looking for colorful nylon to see if maybe there was a tent trapped underneath it,” Selmer said.

About 60 campers were injured during the blowdown. Around 20 were airlifted out of the wilderness with broken bones and other serious injuries.

And the storm didn’t stop when it left the wilderness.

“It actually was a 6,000 mile storm that blew for the next couple of days,” Griffith said. It swept across Canada to the East Coast, then turned south toward the Carolinas, and finally out into the Gulf of Mexico.

All summer crews cleared portage trails and campsites. And their work was just beginning, said Griffith.

“A couple of the wilderness rangers I interviewed told me, ‘We didn’t realize it at the time, but that day was going to govern much of our workload for the next one or two decades, because so much had to be done,’” he said.

Fire danger

Immediately after the blowdown, forest officials quickly realized there was now an enormous amount of timber strewn across the landscape. They knew those millions of downed trees could fuel wildfires that would burn much more aggressively.

In response, they launched campaigns to educate the public about the fire danger caused by the blowdown. Those efforts helped drastically reduce the number of human-caused fires in subsequent years.

Officials devised emergency plans to log outside the wilderness, and conduct a series of prescribed burns inside and outside the Boundary Waters. Those small, intentionally-lit fires created a patchwork of burned areas on the landscape designed to slow down a large fire that they felt would inevitably hit the blowdown area.

And it worked. When the Cavity Lake Fire erupted in 2006, those prior burns made the blaze much more manageable, said Ellen Bogardus-Szymaniak, who came to the Superior National Forest in 2000 to help implement prescribed burns in the blowdown.

“That’s why it didn’t hit the Gunflint Trail, because all that fuel treatment that we did slowed down the fire and made it so that we actually could put it out,” she said.

The blowdown also wiped out large stands of old growth white and red pines. That was extremely tough for longtime visitors, and Forest Service staff, to see.

“It just hurt their hearts because it didn't look like what it used to. All those majestic trees were gone,” recalled Bogardus-Szymaniak.

In their place a much different forest has returned. At the time, University of Minnesota forest ecologist Lee Frelich was studying ancient trees up to 300 years old on Seagull Lake in the Boundary Waters.

He had to completely redesign his research program. “A lot of my study areas, they were flatter than any forest I've ever seen in my life,” Frelich said.

Twenty-five years later, the forest has made a dramatic comeback. But “it’s really a changed forest,” Frelich said.

With big pines and aspen gone, balsam fir, black spruce and white cedar sprouted up, creating dark conifer-dominated forests so dense that they can be difficult to walk through.

In areas that were subsequently burned by prescribed fire or wildfires, the forest is now dominated by aspen and birch trees.

But pine trees, white, red and jack, were almost completely exterminated, Frelich said. The big trees that provided the seeds for new growth were gone.

“And we don’t know how long it will take a lot of those areas to go back to pine,” he said. “Or whether it ever will go back to pine.”

A changed forest

Many people who travel through the Boundary Waters today don’t even know there was a blowdown.

New Forest Service employees who paddled through the area this year wondered why the forest was so young, said Nicole Selmer, who now works as a prevention specialist for the Superior National Forest.

“It’s truly an event that has completely changed that landscape for a long time,” she said.

That can be tough to see, acknowledged Bogardus-Szymaniak, now the Tofte District Ranger for the national forest. But it's also part of the natural cycle of a boreal forest. Disturbances like the blowdown allow for forest regeneration.

“You have wind, ice, insects and fire. That’s what really drives this system.”

“It really hurts because it was so gorgeous,” said Bogardus-Szymaniak. “To me, now, it looks great. But it’s not ever going to be the same in our lifetime and even our kids’ lifetime. It’s going to take 200 or so years to get those beautiful trees that tall and that big.”

And while huge wind events like the blowdown are incredibly rare, Frelich said there is evidence that they may be becoming more common in a warmer climate, especially at northern latitudes.

“And that has really profound implications for the future of the boreal forest,” he said, the southernmost edge of which is in northern Minnesota.

Twenty-five years after living through the blowdown, John Pierce still thinks about it every time he’s in the wilderness.

For years, he refused to take his young kids into the Boundary Waters between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Even today, he always chooses a campsite where he can find refuge along a shoreline.

“I’ll still do that in the summer, if I’m in the Boundary Waters. I’m going to pick a west-facing site, because there’s no way I want to be defenseless against those trees falling.”