ELY — Riley Smith is a self-described data nerd who loves the Boundary Waters. And that combination has led him down some deep rabbit holes.
At a recent Friends of the Boundary Waters event called “Boundary Water Superlatives,” the community coordinator tried to blow up nearly every “fact” people thought they knew about the iconic wilderness area.
“Maybe I’m nitpicking too much,” Smith said with a grin, “but I’m a person that loves this place, and the more I can get things like this right for people, the deeper their appreciation and knowledge for the place.”
His inspiration? Bad trivia nights where even the hosts got the answers wrong. Outfitter Instagram posts perpetuating myths. Google search results that confidently declare falsehoods. For someone who’s spent years combing through DNR depth surveys, university water clarity data, and historical logging maps, these errors needed fixing.
The Great Saganaga swindle
Take the deepest lake, for instance. Everyone “knows” it’s Saganaga, that sprawling behemoth that crosses the Canadian border and supposedly plunges 280 feet down. There’s just one tiny problem with this widely accepted fact: It’s measuring the wrong side of the lake.
“Saganaga is way up there on the Canadian side in big, open water,” Smith said, “which by my definition means it’s not the Boundary Waters because it’s across the international line.” On the U.S. side — you know, the side that actually counts — Saganaga only hits 140 feet.
The real depth champion? Gabimichigami Lake at 209 feet, making it one of the deepest natural lakes in all of Minnesota. Smith said that most lakes deeper than 200 feet in the state are old mine pits, making Gabimichigami’s natural depth all the more impressive. It’s a name that gave our editors and spell-checkers fits, but it’s the truth.
When size matters
The “largest lake” debate gets even messier because, well, how do you even measure “largest”? Surface area? Volume? The number of acres inside the official wilderness boundary?
Smith discovered that Basswood Lake technically has the most acres within the BWCA at 14,229, with Lac La Croix nipping at its heels. Poor Saganaga, so often crowned the king, doesn’t even medal in this race. 
“I’m not dissing Saganaga,” Smith said. “I love the lake, but I’m going to look at the data.”
Lakes nobody knows
Smith developed his own criteria for the hardest lake to visit in the entire Boundary Waters based on terrain, closeness to navigable water, and others. The winner was Nuthatch Lake, which sits somewhere in a primitive management area, about two to three miles from the nearest navigable water. Getting there requires serious bushwhacking skills and a tolerance for misery.
Interestingly, people used to be able to drive there. When a timber company logged the area decades ago, there was an actual road. 
Smith said he had a soft spot for the hard-to-reach lakes.
“It’s one of the coolest pieces of the wilderness,” he said. “These spots simply exist for the moose and the fish and mosquitoes. Some of these spots may not see people for a decade, and part of that is kind of cool.”
Other contenders for hardest-to-reach included lakes with names like Famine and Poverty (someone had a dark sense of humor), Calamity, and Red Eye.
The portage that makes grown paddlers weep
The Mountain to Pemmican portage climbs 236 feet in just 45 rods. That’s a 31-percent grade, which translates to “basically you’re climbing a cliff while carrying a canoe,” Smith said. The trail also features plenty of downed trees, because why not?
And, of course, the longest portage is the historic Four Mile, which clocks in at 1,226 rods.
While the nine mile-long Grand Portage is longer, it isn’t located within the wilderness boundaries even though it has its storied place in canoe country.
The old-growth myth
One of the biggest misconceptions Smith said people had was the all-or-nothing thinking about old-growth forests. 
“Usually, it’s one of the polarities,” he said. “Either the whole Boundary Waters is old-growth forest, it’s never been touched. But we know there was logging, that there were resorts. On the other end of the spectrum, people say the whole place is developed, there’s no old growth left.”
The truth? It’s somewhere in the middle, and defining “old growth” is tricky. An old-growth jack pine stand might only be 100 years old, while an old-growth white pine stand could be 300 years old. The region’s fire ecology creates a natural patchwork. Some forest patches originated from fires in the 1680s, others from the 1880s, and everything in between.
Smith credits much of our knowledge about these fire histories to Bud Heinselman, a fire scientist and one of the founders of Friends of the Boundary Waters who helped secure protection for the area in the 1978 Boundary Waters Act. Heinselman was so devoted to fire science that when the Little Indian Sioux fire broke out in the 1970s, he rushed over with his film camera to document spruce trees burning for slide after slide after slide.
Thanks to Heinselman’s meticulous mapping, we know about  stands like the 1595-origin red pines, or a 1680 white pine stand near Winchell Lake that survived for centuries until the Red Eye Lake fire came through and “just nailed that one stand all the way through.”
“There are lots of really old forests in the Boundary Waters,” Smith said, “but it is hard to say everything’s old growth or everything’s not old growth, because in a place that thrives on fire, you always have a patchwork of all of them.”
Where is the oldest tree located? That’s something of a mystery. Two candidates are often cited, but Smith said it’s most likely a cedar well-protected from any potential fire. Maybe it’s on a island, growing on a cliff, just as it has for the past thousand years.
The philosophy of not knowing
While Smith has spent countless hours measuring, mapping, and calculating superlatives, some mysteries should remain unsolved.
“There are questions out there, like what is the tallest cliff, or what is the largest waterfall?” he said. “I think these should and would take a lifetime to discover. It’s fun to have those surprises when coming around a corner, something you didn’t expect, and then treasure that as a memory made in a way that only wild spaces can create.”
For a self-proclaimed data nerd, it was a reminder that numbers can deepen our love for a place without defining it entirely. The Boundary Waters holds 1,150-plus lakes and countless secrets. Though a few misconceptions were cleared up, there are plenty more mysteries to discover.