Pagami Creek fire left a raw wound across Boundary Waters
BOUNDARY WATERS CANOE AREA WILDERNESS, NEAR ELY — The landscape before us looked like a charred moonscape. We halted our dogsleds, paused on our skis and took in the surreal scene.
Eight of us on an Outward Bound dogsledding and skiing trip had encountered the Pagami Creek Fire area in winter.
Instead of sentinel white pines and dense stands of spruce, the hillside between Pietro Lake and Camdre Lake in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness looked bleak and bald. The hillside was laid open like a raw wound. It was not the Boundary Waters with a buzz cut. Almost nothing was left standing at all by the fire that had burned 92,000 acres last fall.
Here and there, a single charbroiled snag pointed a skinny finger to the sky. A few blackened trees lay across the snowscape, black on white. Every exposed boulder had been scorched. In leeward hollows of snow, a fine gray silt coated the snow like a ghostly powdered sugar.
The air on this late January afternoon smelled charred.
Greg Heide, one of our group’s co-instructors, left Pietro Lake and plodded up the hill, trying to follow the portage trail. In the woods, a portage is easy to follow, framed by trees. But in this eerie expanse, there was no life to define the trail, and snow had obliterated the worn path.
Heide hiked over the hill. He was gone a long time.
Finally, he returned.
“Follow my tracks to the top of the hill,” he said.
Our group, which consisted of five veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, attacked the barren hillside. Skiers stowed their skis and marched up the incline following Heide’s tracks. The dog teams followed, and everyone pitched in to help our 11 Alaskan huskies move the 500-pound sleds up the ridge.
Heide had lost the original portage somewhere over the rise, but we could easily see Camdre Lake, our destination, lying perhaps 300 yards below. We followed the makeshift trail Heide had made, crashing through brambles near the bottom. But we had found our lake.
That was the easy portage.
The torched countryside continued beyond Camdre on a one-third mile portage to Clearwater Lake. We soon lost that portage in the vast burn. Heide pulled out his compass and a map, considering his free-lance options. Those of us on foot could go anywhere, making sharp turns around singed tree trunks and exposed boulders. But we had to find a route that was more forgiving for the dog teams and their unwieldy sleds.
Our first alternative didn’t pan out. We were at the edge of the burn now, and the trees ahead of us had been piled like random pick-up sticks into impenetrable tangles. That had been done last fall by the wind that accompanied the fire. The dogsledders waited patiently behind us as Heide prospected another way forward.
After a lot of searching, we descended into a gully, and there it was in the distance —a white path among the still-standing trees. The portage. Whether that was blind luck or nifty navigating, we never learned.
All we had to do now was pull out the bow saws and carve our way through several substantial deadfalls. The saws sang. Sawdust flew. In half an hour, we had hacked out a path wide enough for the dog teams.
We re-entered an intact forest and emerged onto a creek that led to Clearwater Lake.
We may have been the first people through that part of the burn other than clean-up crews with the U.S. Forest Service.
“I had concerns about this route, because of this,” Heide said, looking back at the blackened and denuded hillside. “But somebody had to do it.”