The 2007 Ham Lake Fire - Day 253

  I did succeed in resting most of the time today. I only did a little bit of cleaning and sorting, and laundry, in between reading chapters of the book I bought at Gunflint Lodge. It's called Gunflint Burning by Cary J. Griffith. He is an author I already was familiar with, and I'm very interested in the Ham Lake Fire. I really couldn't put it down.


A lot of you already know quite a bit about fires and the Boundary Waters. I'm sure some readers don't, so I'll try to give a brief overview and explain my interest.

The story begins with the July 4, 1999 infamous blowdown. A derecho (straight line wind) blew in excess of 90 mph for 1300 miles from North Dakota to Maine. Of the million or so acres in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, over a third were affected. An estimated 25 million trees were blown down.

First reports said "the Kek will never be opened," but of course volunteers got busy, and it was. Then the corridor was improved. The pictures I have from the 2003 Volunteer Vacation I took there show some of the devestation, but those aren't digital, and I don't have them with me. The best I can do is show a picture from last week. You can see the cut ends of tress that are high off the ground. Trees were piled like pick-up sticks. New trees were not yet tall enough to camouflage it as in this picture.


On the Volunteer Vacation I was on, our duties were to clear out more fallen trees (some participants were chain saw certified). Most of us spent the week clipping baby alder trees and berry bushes. With the sudden sunlight after the blowdown, the growth of such shrubbery was phenomenal. We had a crew of 7 people, and we cleared about 6 miles near the center of the Kekakabic trail in five days. (It took us a full day to canoe in, and another full day to canoe out.)

So, the trail was opened, but then the question became, "When will it burn?" There was never any doubt that it would.

Several fires are notable, Alpine Lake, Cavity Lake (2006), and the East Zone Complex Fires all occurred before 2007.

Here is a map of the Cavity Lake Fire (tan), and the Ham Lake Fire (brown). I've drawn a very rough blue line for the NCT across this map, so you can see how the trail was affected.


So after the 2003 trip, and a few years of spinning my wheels, I got serious about planning my hike through this area. I created an itinerary in 2006. Then the Cavity Lake Fire happened. I created an itinerary again in 2007. Ham Lake Fire. I followed this fire quite closely at the time, reading news reports every day. Although that fire was in the spring, the Kek remained closed. Again in 2008, I planned a hike for August. The trail was closed due to the danger of fire. I finally smartened up, and planned a hike for the spring of 2009. That time we were successful.

However, the scars of the Ham Lake Fire were still very raw. The next two pictures are in the section on the east side of Gunflint Lake- visible in the first picture. We saw this area first, because we were hiking east to west, but this was actually the last area burned by the Ham Lake Fire.



After we passed through that, we were on the south side of Gunflint Lake. The lake is about 7 miles long and less than a mile wide. Gunflint Lodge, Heston's Lodge, and many others are located on the south shore of the lake. However, the fire burned right down to the water on the Canadian side, which you can see in this picture from the Gunflint Lodge dock. Previous owners told me they stood and watched the fire come down the hills, hoping it would not jump the lake. (I know that distance sounds like a fantasy fear, but the Ham Lake Fire was pushed by such strong winds that it was forever "spotting," starting fires far ahead of its front.)


On the west side of Gunflint Lake, the fire started at Ham Lake, just slightly south of the trail line. Winds first blew it west and northwest. There was hope that it would burn into the Cavity Lake Fire area, run out of fuel and stop. Look at the map again. But, of course, the winds changed. The fire blew north into Canada, then the wind changed again, and it blew down to the southeast, to the north shore of Gunflint Lake and around the east end as seen in the pictures above.

Here are two picture from 2009 where the trail had burned across the Kek.



Now, these burned areas are covered with 20-foot tall aspen. There is only an occasional charred trunk or stump visible. Except for the stands of younger trees, I could not even tell when we passed through this area last week.

The Ham Lake Fire was one of the largest in Minnesota's history. It was eventually elevated to a Type I Fire- the most serious- because of the people and resources needed to fight it, and because it crossed the international border.

How did it start? Most wildfires are actually started by lightning. This one was the accidental result of a careless campfire, built by an experienced camper. If this doesn't scare you into being extremely careful with fires, I don't know what will. There was not a ban on fires that week, although perhaps there should have been. The conditions were hot, dry, and windy. You can say he should have known better. You can say a lot of things, but this story always makes me a little queasy. Things like this can happen to any of us.

And some of you probably know how the story ended. Because it happened on federal land, he was charged with federal crimes, even though he had not intended to start a forest fire. Unable to deal with the possible consequences, he committed suicide before the case went to trial. His death was the only human casualty of the fire.

The book is excellent, and puts some perspective on the story- better than following news reports. Also, I have met several of the people who are part of the story. I suppose I can't say I know them well enough to call them friends, but enough to really personalize the whole drama.

See Today's Object of Joy