BWCA Forest fire

[Keweenaw]

I hope they manage to get that fire under control before losing too much of that wilderness area.

Fire is natural and necessary for wilderness areas, and as such is not a loss but a gain. The problem lies in protecting property and lives while letting nature take it's course in undeveloped areas. Hopefully everyone in those affected areas is out!

Ed, where did you find the satellite pics?

This.

Much talk about this as a tragedy. It's far from it. Who put the fires out 200 years ago?

This is how nature survives.

The really amazing thing is to go back and see these areas in a year, 5 years, ten years...

[Midwest Ed]

I still remember my initial disappointment during my first visit to Yellowstone Park after the huge 1988 fire that covered over one third of the park. This was about 10 years after the fire. At the time I knew all the logical reasons why the fire shouldn’t be hated but I felt robbed of not having been able to view the pre-fire panoramas and vistas that now seemed scarred. Logic and emotion are often in conflict.

I seem to remember that the loss of property due to the 1988 fire caused the Park Service and Forest Service to rethink their total hands off policy they held up to that point.

Another view of the power of Mother Nature’s destruction happened several years earlier when I was fortunate to have been visiting the Northwest in 1985 just 5 years after Mt. St. Helens. Even then, the devastation was simply amazing. I can’t remember how close we were allowed to approach but I’m thinking it was within a couple of miles. I do remember that we were on a ridge where one of those killed was suspected to have been. The areas of various levels of destruction were quite distinct.

As you approached the forest abruptly switched from normal to trees still standing with most of their branches in tact yet the tree was dead but not really charred. Many of these dead areas had been harvested soon after the eruption.

The next zone was about a half mile wide and consisted of standing trunks but no limbs. All the branches had been totally stripped away. It was like a forest of telephone poles.

The next zone that was one to several miles across was made up of tree trunks laying flat on the ground. There were very few tree trunks lying on top of others. The striking appearance was that all the trees were aligned in the same direction, of course pointing away from the blast, providing the expression of some kind of colossal weather vane.

Inside this zone was the last one where everything resembled a Moonscape. It looked deader than any area of the southwest desert I’d ever seen although you could see some evidence of sprouting flora.

The two remarkable observations were 1) the strangely sharp transition lines between the zones and 2) how quickly even the most inner zone had begun to spring back to life. I haven’t been back there since but out of simple curiosity I have watched most documentary videos made and it seems even the biologists are somewhat surprised by the resiliency of the area.

To keep things “on topic”, it’s sometimes hard to believe that in 1936 a fire destroyed almost one third of the Isle Royale forest tops although some evidence can still be seen.

[johnhens]

Fire is 70% contained.
http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/event/ ... id/210695/

With the blowdowns from last Oct, it will be interesting if a fire occurs on IR in the next few years. Lots of potential fuel similar to the BWCA.