Boundary Waters Wilderness   lef   May 24, 2002 17:58 PDT  ENTS: Thursday I went into the Boundary Waters Wilderness to see the ancient cedars with two reporters from the Duluth News Tribune and five staff from Superior National Forest, including their head vegetation monitoring person, wilderness rangers and forest botanist. The Superior NF is going to do some prescribed burns and they want to inventory ancient cedars before the fire so that those trees can be taken into account in the fire plans. My job was to teach the forest staff how to tell the approximate age of cedar trees by examining their growth form. So, we set out on Seagull Lake--a rather large lake--in four little fiberglass canoes in a full gale with an air and water temperature of about 45 degrees. Spring has not arrived yet, there is no green in northern MN yet. It doesn't look any different than it did last November. Unfortunately, we had to cross a fully exposed channel to get to the site where I wanted to go. What a ride! Seagull Lake can really make a person feel insignificant. Nevertheless, we got to our destination--Threemile Island, the largest of the 250 islands in the lake--slightly wet from the spray of the waves but without capsizing. Threemile Island has several excellent stands of ancient cedars. One of my favorites is on a small bay delimited by a little granite peninsula about 50 feet long with six cedars all between 500 and 1000 years old along its outer edge. These cedars have all the hallmarks of ancient cedars: deeply furrowed whitish bark, strips of dead wood running up the trunk, and asymmetrical crowns with dead tops and reiterated crowns from very heavy side branches. The head of the bay has a dense, swampy, all-aged cedar forest with trees that blew down hundreds of years ago and are still alive, with the branches having turned upwards to become individual trees that are now acquiring ancient characteristics themselves. There are so many trees downed in so many directions that have grafted together, with so many reiterated trunks, that the whole swamp is like one big complex tree--a mat of forest several hundred feet long and 30-40 feet tall that partially hangs out over the water. One can only wonder at how many millennia it took to form this bizarre, complex, self perpetuating structure. The nastiness of Seagull Lake prevented us from visiting some other ancient stands in my plans. We plotted a course to another island with a known ancient cedar stand, but were quickly forced to turn our canoes to head into the waves when we got out on the lake and had to take a different route to a little un-named island where we had lunch while hoping the wind would die down. It didn't, so we navigated back to our launching point through the maze-like north channel which has so many islands and peninsulas that we were finally sheltered from the waves. We found a few old cedars there that I hadn't seen before. The cedars that we were unable to visit will remain secrets that rest solely with the Native Americans and Voyageurs that canoed past them over the centuries, and now with me. I guess Seagull Lake wanted to keep it that way. Some of them are in areas that will not be burned. Neither the Forest Service nor reporters need to know where they are. If Bob and Will ever make it this far north (the Porcupine Mountains of Upper Michigan are called the 'banana belt' by people around the Boundary Waters), and we can shake the reporters that follow me around, maybe I'll show them these secret little trees. Lee Frelich University of MN Department of Forest Resources Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness    Lee E. Frelich    Jun 07, 2002 10:14 PDT  ENTS: Mary Davis asked me for an update on acreages of forest that have never been logged in northern MN Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. I thought I would share them with you as well. This is my latest best estimate of forest acreage that has never been logged, but includes some younger stands that have had natural disturbances. I do separate those acreages blown down in the 1999 windstorm. Each line lists the forest type, standing acreage of virgin forest, blown down acreage, and total (standing + blown down) Red and white pine   53567    8108     61675 Jack pine                 262057 39922   301979 Lowland conifer/ash 33020    3480     36500 Total                        348644 51510   400154 In addition, there is 21,400 acres of 'lichen' community, which has scattered dwarf trees (mostly bur oak, jack pine, red pine, white pine, black spruce and white cedar), and 9,500 acres of Sphagnum-bog with dwarf black spruce and tamarack. The ancient cedars are scattered along lakeshores in groves too small (0.1 acres or less) to show up in an inventory. The number of these groves is not known, but there are likely several hundred. Lee Frelich University of MN Department of Forest Resources   Home