Last night's lecture in Ely MN   Lee Frelich
  Mar 24, 2006 18:24 PST 

Bob:

Over 100 people showed up in Ely last night for the Sigurd Olson Lecture. I
probably had 25 audience questions after presenting an updated version of
the 'Changes coming to Eastern U.S. Forests' talk, which was adapted to
show the problems specific to the Boundary Waters. I added some neat stuff
including migration maps for tree species since the last glaciation, slides
of sudden oak death, and now I have an animated sequence of all the fires
in the Boundary Waters over the last 400 years that I can add as well.

I visited Sigurd Olson's house and writing shack where all of his books
were written. His rock collection, pipe, typewriter, etc. are all still in
the exact place where he left them when he died. I sat in his chair--what
great experience. The current owner of the house gave me a slab from a red
pine tree that originated in 1702, and had a fire scar in 1826 from Jasper
Lake in the Boundary Waters.

There were wolves howling during the night that could be heard throughout
Ely (which is not very big), and we walked across Big Lake today to an
island a friend owns with 300 year old red pines on it. We followed a set
of wolf tracks to get there. We also found an excellent black ash and white
cedar swamp with trees up to 250 years old. There was a lot of evidence of
moose using the swamp.

The boreal forest is delightful with 2-3 feet of snow, and I chose to go
without snowshoes, and broke through into some incredibly deep holes under
the snow. Someone had to pull me out of one. We were the only people on all
of Big Lake, which is 5 or 6 miles long and has many rocky islands covered
by red and white pines with crowns that lean northeast due to winds from
derechos. It has been warmer in recent days. Today we had temperatures
around 30, but the ice on the lake is 3 feet thick, so, it was very safe to
walk on.

Lee
Re: Last night's lecture in Ely MN   Lee Frelich
  Mar 25, 2006 14:50 PST 

Michele:

I don't think I hit the water level, where I fell through was actually in
the black ash and cedar swamp, and I think my foot was in the den of some
animal under a partially uprooted tree that had about 4 feet of show on top
of it. If it was a bear, I didn't wake it up.

We did see numerous cracks in the ice on the lake, one open spot where we
knew the water was only 2 feet deep, and one funny looking bulge under the
snow that may have been the entrance to a bigger crevice created by
pressure ridges in the ice, but we wisely chose not to walk over it.

Overall it was a minor adventure compared to my grandfather who crossed
Lake Michigan from Manitowoc to Ludington by dogsled during the winter of
1912. We also had a dog with us on Friday (a big Newfoundland), and we put
her to work by having her pull a sled with all our stuff in it.

All those granite islands and peninsulas covered by 100-200 year old white
pines is quite a sight, its like a landscape scale Japanese garden. Too
bad its all going to die from global warming.

Lee
  Glad they were able to fish you out of the hole, Lee. One of my secret
fears would be to be out there somewhere, traversing ice fields on my way
to some summit or whatever, and to fall into a crevice, perhaps more than
100 feet, with the rope breaking so the other folks on the trip couldn't
easily get me out, especially seeing as I'd likely have at least a few
major bones busted, and then of course an earthquake would happen and the
crevice would close up, and I would be totally smooshed, not even enjoying
the dignity of instead being found millennia later all in one piece frozen
in the ice, for future humanoids to ponder upon. Nope, they'd find a big
red frozen splat... yikes, such thoughts, all because you got fished out
of a hole. Good thing you didn't hit water level... or did you?
Michele