A trek to Pose Lake along the Powwow Trail two weekends ago was a reunion of sorts for a small group of friends. For me, it was a return to the site of the Pagami Creek Fire, which I first visited back in 2011, three weeks after the fire had incinerated more than 90,000 acres, and more than 50,000 acres in a single unforgettable day in September 2011.
Three weeks after the blaze, the area was a black moonscape, with no sign of life for miles. The fire was so hot, it burned virtually everything, leaving behind only ash and a surreal graveyard of blackened tree trunks that stretched to the horizon.
Thirteen years later, I was eager to revisit the area to assess the recovery from that incredible fire.
For my long-time friend Mary Shedd, it was an opportunity to walk part of the trail she helped build back in the late 1970s, during her early years with the U.S. Forest Service.
While portions of the trail follow an old logging road that had headed north from the former community of Forest Center, most of the trail’s roughly 30 miles had been carved by hand through the untracked forest. Mary, who lived 30 years in Tower, recently moved fulltime to Isabella with her husband Steve. She never lost her enthusiasm for trail-building and even now, in her 70s, she still spends much time in the woods clearing routes and blazing trees.
Joining us on the trail were my wife Jodi and our friend Victoria, the young one of the group.
The Powwow Trail is a path that Mother Nature has done her best to wipe away. In 1999, the massive blowdown made the trail impossible for months and at the time, there were some in the forest service who were content with giving up on the trail. When Pagami blew through, it left thousands of dead snags lining the trail and most have since fallen over, providing yet another blow to the trail.
But we were reminded on the 12-mile out-and-back trek of how it is that the trail still survives despite these challenges. Along the way, we ran into a crew of about a dozen volunteers who were spending their weekend helping to maintain the trail. It’s been volunteers who have devoted thousands of hours over the years to keeping the Powwow a viable, and apparently popular, trail. While I’ve hiked Boundary Waters trails many times, I had never seen so many others with the same idea before, and that’s not even counting the trail workers.
The recovery
What all those fellow hikers find is a landscape that is, in places, on the way to recovery from an epic disaster. Much of the landscape is now blanketed in a carpet of either dense jack pine saplings or equally dense aspen sprouts, all underlain by a tangle of crisscrossed tree trunks, like pick-up sticks, that make any venturing off the trail challenging. While aerial surveys in winter have shown a substantial moose population within the burn, we saw only a couple signs of moose along the route. While moose have long legs, I thought it has to be challenging for them to make their way through much of the surrounding forest.
The dense jack pine do provide good habitat for at least some species. Spruce grouse thrive in young jack pine and we kicked up several grouse along the way. Most were ruffed grouse, but we confirmed at least one was a spruce grouse, since it only flew up in the nearest tree when our two dogs came through and flushed it. It was no more than 15 feet away, but it virtually vanished in the thick jack pine. I had to slowly work my way through a tangle of downed logs and stand virtually underneath it to get a clear shot (with my camera) at the bird. The density of the jack pine was the clearest possible evidence of the remarkable effectiveness of the survival strategy of this fire-adapted species. In the wake of Pagami’s intense heat, the millions of cones that had grown but remained closed on the jack pine that grew in the area, suddenly opened, releasing untold billions of small, winged seeds across a landscape now open to the wind and with freshly exposed mineral soil flush with nutrients. The result was an upland landscape completely dominated by jack pine.
Even as the forest rebounds, the evidence of Pagami remains everywhere. Despite the 13 years since the fire, the millions of tree trunks piled along the forest floor look weathered but showed no sign of imminent decay. Even the millions of jack pine cones still lying on the ground, which must date back to the fire, looked as if they were no more than a year or two old. It’s as if the microorganisms that normally decompose these organic materials were wiped away in the fire as well. Walking along the trail, on in the midst of a drought, I couldn’t help but think that there was a tremendous amount of dry fuel still remaining on the landscape, just waiting for another lightning strike.
I had expected a more verdant landscape than we saw. In many places, the plants that normally grow on the forest floor still appeared in short supply, suggesting the inferno killed many of them at their roots and took the seed sources with them. Moss, which reproduce through windblown spores, seemed to be the most common groundcover in most uplands. While the land was recovering, Pagami had seemingly set back the clock on much more than might be expected.
Even the rocks were changed. I’ve used a big blowtorch at times over the years to break up large boulders in our yard, which leaves the rocks noticeably brittle, and I recognized the same effect on the rocks that had apparently been superheated as a result of the fire. Halfway into our hike, on an open face of ledgerock overlooking Pose Lake, we stopped for lunch. All around us were the still-charred remains of trees that had once covered this rock, but there was only scattered living vegetation that had since made its way back.
I imagined this same rock face, left exposed as the last glaciers melted away ten thousand years ago, and surmised it wouldn’t have looked much different. This was a place that had been transformed and it will probably be generations before it returns to its former state. And given climate change and our increasing frequency of fire, there’s no guarantee that it will ever be like it was.
Yet at least a few areas within the blaze were left mostly intact. As it is throughout the Boundary Waters, the Powwow passes through some impressive wetland complexes. While these areas were lightly burned by Pagami, they avoided the intense heat that seared the uplands. I remember that these were the only places one could still find a touch of green 13 years ago and they seemed to have recovered most fully.
That, of course, is the nature of fire. Its intensity varies across the landscape. Wetlands, lakes, and high hills tend to leave small oases in their wakes. Variations in the fuels and forest composition make a difference as well, leaving behind a mosaic of vegetation of different types and ages, that provides ideal habitat for so many of our wild neighbors in the North Country. If you want to get a look at this process in action, a walk on the Powwow Trail is sure to be enlightening.