The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW or BWCA) is a vast wilderness in the Superior National Forest of northeastern Minnesota. It comprises of pristine forests, glacial lakes, and streams. Located at the Boundary Waters, it is administered by the United States Forest Service.
Efforts to preserve the primitive landscape began in the early 20th century and culminated in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act of 1978. The area is a popular destination for canoeing, hiking, and fishing, and is the most visited wilderness in the United States.
Geography
The BWCAW extends along of the Canadian border in the Arrowhead Region of Minnesota. The combined region of the BWCAW, Superior National Forest, Voyageurs National Park, and Ontario's Quetico and La Verendrye provincial parks make up a large area of contiguous wilderness lakes and forests called the "Quetico-Superior country", or simply the Boundary Waters. Lake Superior lies to the south and east of the Boundary Waters.
Nearly 20% of the BWCAW's total area, or , is water. Within the borders of the area are over 1,100 lakes and hundreds of miles of rivers and streams. Much of the other 80% of the area is forest. The BWCAW contains the largest remaining area of uncut forest in the eastern portion of the United States.
The Laurentian Divide between the watersheds of the Great Lakes and Hudson Bay runs northeast–southwest through the east side of the BWCAW, following the crest of the Superior Upland and Gunflint Range. The crossing of the divide at Height of Land Portage was an occasion for ceremony and initiation rites for the fur-trading Voyageurs of the 18th and early 19th centuries. (Abstract) The wilderness also includes the highest peak in Minnesota, Eagle Mountain (), part of the Misquah Hills.
Located around the perimeter of the BWCAW are six ranger stations: in Cook, Aurora, Ely, Isabella, Tofte and Grand Marais. The two nearby communities with most visitor services are Ely and Grand Marais. Several historic roads such as the Gunflint Trail, Echo Trail (County Road 116) and Fernberg Road (County Road 18) allow access to many wilderness entry points.
Climate The weather station Ely 25E is on the southern edge of Snowbank Lake (Minnesota), a lake in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness has a dry winter humid continental climate (Köppen Dwb), bordering on a subarctic climate (Köppen Dfc).
Natural history
Geology
The lakes of the BWCAW are located in depressions formed by differential erosion of the tilted layers of the Canadian Shield. For the past two million years, massive sheets of ice have repeatedly scoured the landscape. The last glacial period ended with the retreat of the Laurentide Ice Sheet from the Boundary Waters about 17,000 years ago. The resulting depressions in the landscape later filled with water, becoming today′s lakes.
Many varieties of Precambrian bedrock are exposed including: granite, basalt, greenstone, gneiss, as well as metamorphic rocks derived from volcanic and sedimentary rocks. Greenstone of the Superior craton located near Ely, Minnesota, is up to 2.7 billion years old. Igneous rocks of the Duluth Complex comprise the bedrock of the eastern Boundary Waters. Ancient microfossils have been found in the banded iron formations of the Gunflint Chert.
Forest ecology The Boundary Waters area is near the border of the true boreal forest and the Laurentian Mixed Forest Province (commonly called the "North Woods"), a transitional zone between the boreal forest to the north and the temperate hardwood forest to the south that contains characteristics of each. Trees found within the wilderness area include conifers such as red pine, eastern white pine, jack pine, balsam fir, white spruce, black spruce, and white-cedar, as well as deciduous birch, aspen, ash, and maple. Blueberries and raspberries can be found in cleared areas. The BWCAW is estimated to contain of old growth forest, woods that may have burned but have never been logged., Table 4.1. This figure is for solid contiguous areas of virgin forest; it does not include some smaller areas within cut-over forests, nor some shoreline areas of virgin woods. Id. Before fire suppression efforts began during the 20th century, forest fires were a natural part of the Boundary Waters ecosystem, with recurrence intervals of 30 to 300 years in most areas.
On July 4, 1999, a powerful wind storm, or derecho, swept across Minnesota, central Ontario, and southern Quebec. Winds as high as knocked down millions of trees, affecting about within the BWCAW and injuring 60 people. This event became known officially as the Boundary Waters–Canadian derecho, commonly referred to as "the Boundary Waters blowdown". Although campsites and portages were quickly cleared after the storm, an increased risk of wildfire due to the large number of downed trees became a concern. The U.S. Forest Service undertook prescribed burns to reduce the forest fuel load in the event of a wildfire.
The first major wildfire within the blowdown area occurred in August 2005, burning between Alpine Lake and Seagull Lake in the northeastern BWCAW. In 2006, two fires at Cavity Lake and Turtle Lake burned more than . In May 2007, the Ham Lake Fire started near the location of the Cavity Lake fire, eventually covering in Minnesota and Ontario and becoming the most extensive wildfire in Minnesota in 90 years. In 2011, the Pagami Creek Fire grew to over , spreading beyond the wilderness boundary to threaten homes and businesses. Smoke from the Pagami Creek Fire drifted east and south as far as the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Ontario, Chicago, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia. In 2021, it was closed due to wildfire for the first time since the 1970s, as the Greenwood Fire threatened access and spread rapidly to the south of its origin, and other smaller fires were burning within the wilderness. Showing Whelp and John Ek fires.
Wildlife Animals found in the BWCAW include white-tailed deer, western moose, beaver, Great Lakes wolves, black bears, Ruffed Grouse, bobcats, bald eagles, peregrine falcons, and loons. It is within the range of the largest population of wolves in the contiguous United States, as well as an unknown number of Canada lynx. It has also been identified by the American Bird Conservancy as a globally important bird habitat.
Woodland caribou once inhabited the region but have disappeared due to encroachment by deer, and the effects of a brainworm parasite carried by deer which is harmful to both caribou and moose populations. Very rare sightings have been reported in nearby areas as recently as the 1980s.
Human history
Native Americans
The north country was inhabited by the Paleo Indian culture circa 8000 BC. Limited artifacts have been found in the BWCAW from that era and the subsequent Archaic period circa 6000 years ago. Artifacts from the Early Woodland Era (circa 1300 years ago) have not been found there, but pottery and clay pipes from the Later Woodland Indians have been found there.
The area was then sparsely populated by the Sioux. Then the Ojibwe arrived and the Sioux migrated westward. The area then became a part of the homeland of the Ojibwe people, who traveled the waterways in canoes made of birch bark. Within the BWCAW are hundreds of prehistoric pictographs and petroglyphs on rock ledges and cliffs. It is thought that the Hegman Lake Pictograph located on a large overlooking rock wall on North Hegman Lake was most likely created by the Ojibwe. The pictograph appears to represent Ojibwe meridian constellations visible in winter during the early evening, knowledge of which may have been useful for navigating in the deep woods during the winter hunting season. The Grand Portage Indian Reservation, just east of the BWCAW at the community of Grand Portage, is home to a number of Ojibwe to this day.
European exploration and development
In 1688 the French explorer Jacques de Noyon became the first European known to have traveled through the BWCAW area. Later, during the 1730s, La Vérendrye and others opened the region to trade, mainly in beaver pelts. By the end of the 18th century, the fur trade had been organized into groups of canoe-paddling voyageurs working for the competing North West and Hudson's Bay Companies, with a North West Company fort located at the Grand Portage on Lake Superior. The final rendezvous was held at Grand Portage in 1803, after which the North West Company moved its operations further north to Fort William (now Thunder Bay). In 1821 the North West Company merged with the Hudson's Bay Company and the center of the fur trade moved even further north to the posts around Hudson Bay.
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the area's legal and political status was disputed. The Treaty of Paris, which ended the American Revolutionary War in 1783, had defined the northern border between the United States and Canada based on the inaccurate Mitchell Map. Ownership of the area between Lake of the Woods and Lake Superior was unclear, with the United States claiming the border was further north at the Kaministiquia River and Canada claiming it was further south beginning at the Saint Louis River. In 1842, the Webster–Ashburton Treaty clarified the border between the United States and Canada using the old trading route running along the Pigeon River and Rainy River (today the BWCAW's northern border).
The BWCAW area remained largely undeveloped until gold, silver and iron were found in the surrounding area during the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s. Logging in the area began around the same time to supply lumber to support the mining industries, with production peaking in the late 1910s and gradually trailing off during the 1920s and 1930s.
Protection In 1902, Minnesota's Forest Commissioner Christopher C. Andrews persuaded the state to reserve of land near the BWCAW from being sold to loggers. In 1905 he visited the area on a canoe trip and was impressed by the area's natural beauty. He was able to save another from being sold for development. He soon reached out to the Ontario government to encourage them to preserve some of the area's land on their side of the border, noting that the area could be "an international forest reserve and park of very great beauty and interest". This collaboration led to the creation of the Superior National Forest and the Quetico Provincial Park in 1909.
The BWCAW itself was formed gradually through a series of actions. By the early 1920s, roads had begun to be built through the Superior National Forest to promote public access to the area for recreation. In 1926 a section of within the Superior National Forest was set aside as a roadless wilderness area by Secretary of Agriculture William Marion Jardine. This area became the nucleus of the BWCAW. In 1930, Congress passed the Shipstead-Newton-Nolan Act, which prohibited logging and dams within the area to preserve its natural water levels. Through additional land purchases and shifts in boundaries, the amount of protected land owned by the government in the area grew even further. In 1938, the area's borders were expanded and altered (roughly matching those of the present day BWCAW), and it was renamed the Superior Roadless Primitive Area.