Last week, Tom Ellsworth was in Grand Marais, Minn., standing on the shores of Lake Superior. Thick with smoke, the air was acrid, and Ellsworth and his wife, Nancy, who live in the Twin Cities, had trouble breathing. Canceling their vacation at a Gunflint Trail Resort was a no-brainer.

“Our grandchildren were with us and we just made the decision to make other plans with all that smoke in the air,” Tom said.

Half a continent away, Dennis Harms was at home last week in Chugiak, Alaska. A private pilot, he has flown the entirety of Canada, west to east, and has seen a wide swath of North America’s boreal forest.

He has also fished many times for smallmouth bass in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and adjacent Quetico Provincial Park.

“Central Alaska’s forests are very similar to Canada’s and to northern Minnesota’s,” Harms said. “Fortunately, we had a late spring this year in Alaska, and quite a bit of rain. So fires haven’t been a big problem. But in a dry year, it’s a tinderbox. A few years ago, I bought a big pump and a lot of sprinklers. If it’s a dry summer, I’ll set them up around our house.”

Solomon Carriere and his wife, Renee, live even more remotely, in the northern Saskatchewan woods, 38 miles from the nearest village. Last year, their home and outbuildings were nearly lost to a forest fire.

“It was the worst fire season I’ve seen up here,” Salomon said Wednesday by satellite phone. “We had huge fires on two sides of us that were within a day of reaching our home. Fortunately, the wind changed. Our fire seasons, it seems, are starting earlier and earlier every year.”

None of this is a surprise to Lee Frelich, a University of Minnesota professor and forest ecologist whose specialties include fire and its effects on the northern Minnesota landscape, including the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

“North America’s boreal forest extends in a huge arc from Alaska through central Canada and dips briefly into northern Minnesota before sweeping north again to Quebec,” Frelich said. “Minnesota’s share of the boreal might seem big to us, especially when we have fires like we’ve had this summer. But our northern forest is only a small part of a much larger forest picture, and a much bigger fire picture.”

Fires raging through the North Woods are as old as time, Frelich said, and serve a purpose, regenerating trees, wiping out pests and resetting landscapes for wildlife.

What’s primarily changed is the warming climate.

Due in part to higher temperatures, 2½ times more Alaska acres burned from 2000 to 2020 than in the previous 20 years, and three of the four highest-acreage fire years have occurred since 2000. Alaska forested areas ravaged by fire are forecast to increase by as much as 169% by 2050.

Canada, meanwhile, warms at roughly twice the rate of the rest of the world, and in its high Arctic, about three times the rate. Black spruce is the dominant boreal species in Alaska and Canada, and the higher temperatures draw moisture from these trees and other plants, setting the stage for fires.

Additionally, in Canada, only about a fifth of forest fires in the past 40 years have been within areas managed for timber. The rest have occurred in vast, uninhabited, roadless areas, making extinguishing them impractical. This fact renders moot, in many cases, the argument that the particulate-laden smoke that has blanketed parts of the U.S. this summer is the fault of the Canadian government or timber industry.

The bad news, Frelich said, is that the more than 900 fires blazing across Canada this summer, and the 16 or so infernos still burning in northern Minnesota, including in the BWCA, are a sign of things to come.

The blazes are part of a transition, Frelich said, that could see northern Minnesota’s forests change from boreal to deciduous by the end of the century.

Imagine the BWCA as an oak savannah rather than a tapestry of tall pines, and you get the picture.

“Complicating matters today in Minnesota is the changed composition of our northern forests, due to logging and human settlement,” Frelich said. “The increased frequency of high wind events, which result in part from higher dew points, also contributes to more energy in the atmosphere, which knocks down millions of trees, adding to fuel for fires.”

Prior to European settlement, red, white and jack pines dominated the northern Minnesota landscape. But demand for saw timber led to their relative elimination in the state’s north country.

“The natural tree succession in northern Minnesota that follows pine is birch-aspen and eventually balsam fir,” Frelich said. “With so much fir now in northern Minnesota, and much of it and spruce dead or dying due to spruce budworm, the region’s fire regime is only more complicated.”

A return to indigenous fire prevention practices could mitigate future northern Minnesota fire risks, Frelich said. Small fires intentionally set to remove brush and provide fire breaks were part of native Minnesotans’ lives for centuries before European settlement.

Meanwhile, Tom and Nancy Ellsworth and their grandchildren found an opening at a resort on Big Sandy Lake near McGregor, Minn., and are vacationing there this week, largely free of fire smoke.

Bob and Dea Whitten haven’t been so lucky. They live on White Iron Lake outside of Ely and have spent recent days wearing N95 masks while being outdoors and watching Fire Boss airplanes scoop water from in front of their home to dump on fires blazing a short distance away.

“We’ve got our medications and a change of clothing in the truck, ready to leave if we have to,” said Dea, a lifetime Ely area resident. “I can’t remember any fires I’ve been this worried about.”

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