Sundays with Stephanie

Good morning from Ely, Minnesota. After the initial fire evacuation, Kurt and I rebooted our vacation and came up on Wednesday afternoon to “True North Island.”

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The 1991 blowdown storm tore through the Boundary Waters and flattened every tree in a swath forty miles long and ten miles wide — roughly 500,000 acres, gone flat in an afternoon. Ellie, Kurt, and I were out on True North Island when it happened. Almost immediately, people started talking about what happens when all that downed timber dries out. Because eventually it does. And eventually, it burns.

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We’d already seen a few fires over the years, some right here on Burntside Lake. Everyone in the north woods thinks about forest fires, or should. We all do our small part to keep the odds in our favor. But that awareness didn’t arrive gently — it arrived the hard way, the night we very nearly burned down our own island.

I told this story once before, in True North Cabin Cookbook, Vol. 1. I’ve been thinking about it again this week, because I’m back on the island for vacation, and there are wildfires burning all around us. Containment is starting to happen, finally. This was the view at sunrise a few days ago — hazy, orange, the kind of sky that makes you sit up straight before you’ve even had coffee.

The Camp and Bear Trap fires are sitting at 30% containment as I write this on a Sunday morning. All that fuel from the blowdown, plus everything else this climate has stacked up since, is burning. We’re the blue dot on the map. The Miller Island fire I wrote about last week is fully out. Red zones are evacuated, yellow is “set” status, green is “ready.” Over 1,100 firefighters are on the ground in Minnesota right now, and from where I sit, I don’t expect anything but good news from here. They’re doing extraordinary work.

Now. Here’s the story.