Fire update:
Yesterday they moved the containment meter up to 55% and as of 6pm today they made it 65%. They're still saying it's stationary with the occasional flare up. Apparently they're having a hard time with it smoldering in the duff (layer of dry pine needles and whatnot).
They had thunderstorms in the area but didn't get much precipitation today.
There are a bunch of maps online but they're all PDFs and I don't seem to be able to link to those. I found one that shows all of the hotspots that they've found with the infrared detectors. Based on the IR map I'd say that the fire has burned right up to the shore of Little Saganaga all along the northeast side of the lake. I'm pretty sure the "famous" Little Sag campsite with the cliff behind it is right in the middle of that part of the lake. Hard to say how affected the site itself might be but I'm pretty sure there's been fire in the area.
Gabimichigami (NW of Little Sag) looks like it's had about 80% of it's shoreline burned. Ogishkemuncie (NW of Gabi) is only about 20% affected at the northeast end of the lake.

Here's a non-sunset photo of a Beaver taking off. It just looks like sunset because of all the smoke in the air.
The Beavers are US Forest Service planes, they own 3 of them and use them throughout the Superior National Forest, mainly doing forest fire patrols. It was one of these planes that discovered the Cavity Lake fire on July 14th.
They're really cool old airplanes dating back to the 1950s. I've never gotten to ride in one but did get climb around on one at Sawbill once. They were loading up equipment and canoes to go help out some campers that were stranded or injured or something and I helped tie a canoe on top of a pontoon, the pilot let me sit in the cockpit for a minute. It was boss. You can see there's a canoe tied to the plane in this photo, gives you some idea of how big the planes are. The canoe is probably at least 16' long.

Too hot:
According to the Discovery Channel weather station in our bathroom it's 101.3 outside.
I went to pick up some lumber for the kitchen cabinets and on the way back drove past a work crew laying asphalt. Between the sun beating down heating up the existing asphalt and the truckloads of hot new asphalt coming in I can't think of a worse job.
So due to the heat I've been doing pinball repair in the basement and surfing the internet in front of the fan rather than working on the cabinets. And eating the occasional popsicle.
I've been kind of negligent on the fire updates and I just found the motherload of fire pictures so here's the latest.
They've been reporting for a couple of days now that the fire is 45% contained. The controlled area is apparently along the east side, along the Gunflint trail where all the businesses and residences are. They've been using "fire line explosives" along the southwest side of the fire, that's the area between Little Saganaga and Kekekabic. According to the Forest Service the explosives "create a clean natural looking firebreak." Now the plan is to use that same technique to the north of Kekekabic. There are 515 people working on the fire right now. The USFS says the fire has been basically stationary since mid-week thanks to the cooperative weather (rain and calm winds) and the efforts of the fire fighters. The crews are using hand held heat detectors to find and snuff out hot spots, seems like it could take them a long time to cover the nearly 32,000 acres that have been affected so far.
Here's a picture from the early days when the fire was burning hot and fast:

This island looks pretty devastated but if you look at the large version of the picture you can see there are still a few patches of green here and there.

Here's a humans eye view of the aftermath.

Here are some comments I got after I posted the picture of the firefighters heading out in the canoes:
Eejaydee said...
What good are firefighters able to do from canoes? Do they have canoes with a water canon on it, like the fire fighter boats?
Carrie & Rob said...
Do they splash it with their paddles?
-r
While these aren't canoes I think the picture answers the question.

The Minnesota National Guard has at least two Blackhawk helicopters helping with the fire.

This isn't an especially interesting photo but the guy is the operations chief for the fire. His name is Steve Decker.

Here's a picture showing a portage out of Seagull Lake where the fire was really intense.

As bad as that looks there is hope, here's a cone from a Jack Pine with seeds dispersed. Jack Pine cones only release their seeds after a fire, the heat is what makes the cone open up.

This one is even more remarkable to me, you might need to look at the big version to see the sprouts coming up.
MPR did a nice story with a naturalist the other day, they were walking around one of these burned areas. The naturalist talked about a plant that comes up right after a fire, the following summer it flowers and drops seeds, the seeds then stay in the soil until there's another fire. Apparently they've documented cases of the seeds being dormant for 200 years.
The naturalist did a good job of making the point that fire is part of the ecology just like rain and wind. She was sympathetic toward people who are upset about the dramatic change to places they love but she said if it wasn't for fires those places never would have gotten to be the way we remember them in the first place. People tend to think of places like this as static but they're really not, it's just that the changes are normally too slow for us to comprehend them.
Later in the interview they came across an eagles nest in the burned area, they could hear at least one juvenile eagle calling to it's parents who were also in the area.

The USFS posted this one to show that there are patches of forest that don't get destroyed by the fire. I think it's more interesting to look in the burned areas where you can see that all the logs are laying down in the same direction. That's because they were all blown down by the straight line wind in 1999.

And lastly an amusing picture for any former Sawbill employees, the fire crews had to get canoe safety training before heading out, I prefer to think of it as a canoe orientation. (Everybody who rents a canoe from Sawbill gets a canoe orientation no excuses.)

Lastly I apologize to anyone with a slow internet connection, but I couldn't resist putting in all these photos.

The long awaited Mice entry:
OK, if you've actually been waiting for this you're probably going to be disapointed.
For about 4 months we've had a very evasive and persistent mouse chewing up our stuff and then pooping on what's left behind. To some extent we're used to this as it's been kind of a chronic late fall/early winter situation since we moved into this house. I began to get irritated when the mouse got into the new drawers (all three of them) and pooped on everything in them. The first time this happened I got out the seven functional traps (we've actually worn some out and have some others that are used only for keeping Lucy off the furniture) baited them up with peanut butter and set them out. We got nothing for several weeks and the mice seemed to vanish for a while, the peanut butter got stale and dried out and the traps eventually got put away again.
Ironically as I'm writing this Sandy is washing dishes or something and she just set off a trap. There was only a minimal amount of swearing so I don't think it got her. Anyway...
After we got back from Ride the Rockies it became clear that the mice were just laying low waiting for their chance to have the run of the house. There was poop everywhere and lots of chewed up food items, including in the 3 drawers again. The traps came out again and this time I decided to freshen them up with a little chocolate syrup. At this point let me say that mice love chocolate but they seem unwilling to soil their pallets with something as common as Hershey's syrup over stale peanut butter.
This time we did get some action but every time a trap was triggered the mouse would somehow escape. There were at least 6 incidents of a trap being set off and no captured mouse. I think they were probably triggering them by running across them on their way to the chocolate chips.
By now I was starting to take this personally. I pride myself on being good at catching mice. One year when I worked at Sawbill I caught 63 mice (actually there were a couple of voles and a shrew included in that count) as part of a competition with another crew member (Chris McConn, he caught 61) so I think I have some idea what I'm doing.
One day while I was at work I got a call from Sandy who happened to be at home for some reason. She had just opened the cupboard and surprised a mouse using her apron as a rope ladder on it's way to score some brown sugar. She cleverly grabbed the apron and took it and the mouse outside where she deposited it into the recycling bin. She was very proud of herself and proceeded to give me some shit about how she was doing better with the mice than me. I kept my mouth shut but I was kind of worried about what we were going to do with the mouse in the longer term. I was pretty sure she wouldn't be the one to "dispose" of it and I wasn't sure how I might go about that.
Well we didn't need to worry about it, the mouse took care of that dilemma for us. Pretty soon I got another phone call, it's Sandy and she tells me that she went out to check on the mouse (don't ask me why) and it seems to have gotten cut in half. Well it turns out she could only see half of the mouse because the other half of it had made it's way through a dime sized hole in the bottom of the recycling bin. She figured this all out while she was on the phone with me. "It's still alive but it seems to be stuck" she said. This was actually irritating to me because now not only do I have to figure out what to do with a live mouse, now it's a live mouse that's wearing our recycling bin like a tutu. As I ride my bike home from work I'm picturing using scissors to extricate the mouse from the hole, not a pleasent mental image.
As it turns out I need not have worried because the mouse again was looking out for my best interests. By the time I got home the mouse had sucessfully traversed the entire hole and was nowhere to be found. It did however leave it's calling card (a turd) to let us know we had been outsmarted again.
So at this point I'm at a bit of a loss, it appears that we may be dealing with special forces mice or maybe insurgent/Taliban mice or something. I don't know exactly, but it's frustrating to think about relative brain size and not be able to overcome this problem.
One night I'm laying in bed sweating (because of the weather not the mice) half asleep but half awake. Somehow I started thinking about old Warner Bros. cartoons and how the mice were always after cheese. Eventually I dozed off. The next morning I remembered my thoughts about the cheese and disregarded them as too cartooney to actually work. Well after another week or so of fruitles efforts I decided to give it a shot. I gathered up all the traps, sat down with some toothpicks and cleaned out all the coagulated old peanut butter and loaded those babies up with some Kraft American Deli-Deluxe.
That night we heard one of the traps go off, another false alarm we thought but then there was a rattling sound. I went out to investigate and suffice it to say there was a "not dead yet" mouse in the trap, I finished him off and went back to bed with a feeling of accomplishment. The next morning after I finished my Lucky Charms I scooted back from the table and noticed that another of the traps had been set off but there was no mouse. I figured commando mouse had disarmed this one before getting caught in the other trap. While I was retrieving the trap so I could reset it I noticed a tail sticking out from under the cabinet. Feeling extremely apprehensive I grabbed the tail (expecting an ambush or something) and pulled out another mouse. It didn't have any obvious injuries, but upon closer inspection it did have a bit of a dent in the side of it's head. I suspect he tried to pull out a split second too late and managed to avoid getting grabbed but caught a lethal blow to the side of the head.
The next night we got one more. He didn't pull off anything fancy like the other two he just had his head smashed in the trap, maybe he was still in training or something.
It felt like such a accomplishment that I actually took a couple pictures of the dead mice that I was going to post here, but after writing all this I feel like it might be kind of gratuitious so I'll leave it up to your imagination.
Instead here's a nice picture of a butterfly that was in our back yard this afternoon.

Here's a cool picture I found, it's worth clicking on it to see the big version.

Carrie, Rob, Sandy and I are going on a canoe trip in August. This entry is mainly about canoe trip planning but the rest of you can read if you want. Not that I could stop you anyway…
So it’s possible that this fire could still be burning when we’re up there for the trip, although they’re calling it 30% contained right now and they got between a half and one inch of rain yesterday. It sounds like that helps with the pine needles and small stuff but the big logs will keep burning through that kind of rain. And there was lots of lightening as well so they’re concerned about other fires being started from that.
The Forest Service seems comfortable with the amount of control they have over the situation, but they keep saying that depending on conditions it could be fall before the thing goes out completely.
If the fire is still burning in mid August it’s possible (but unlikely) that they won’t allow us to enter the BWCA at all, it’s probable that they’ll restrict where we go and I’m assuming that we won’t be allowed to have campfires under any circumstances.
I’m willing to bet it will be out by mid August and there won’t be much in the way of restrictions. If the fire is out I wanted to suggest the possibility of going to see some of the burned areas. I’m not advocating this, just pointing it out as an option.
We’d probably have to go up to Little Saganaga and maybe take a day trip to the northeast from there to really get into the middle of where the fire is right now. We would have to cover more ground to get up there but it wouldn’t be especially difficult to do in the amount of time we have planned.
We don’t have to decide any of this now or really until probably August 14th but I thought it might be good for us to give it a little thought.


So this crappy map can give an idea of where things are but you can’t see much detail.
Our start point is a couple miles south of the bottom center of this map. The original plan was to go west and spend time on the big lakes along the left side of the map. If we decide to go see the fire we’d need to go to the upper right corner of this map, the big lake up there is Little Saganga.

So here's a bunch of firefighters coming or going on Seagull lake.
Seagull lake has been reopened to the public for day use only, although you're supposed to be careful. All of the businesses in the area are also open.
I can't find a good updated map showing where the fire is, but as of late last week it was progressing slowly to the west in the blowdown area against the wind. Thursday they were showing it up to the northeast side of Little Saganaga so it may have moved farther around that lake by now.

OK, this picture is better than the previous one:

Here's an interesting fire photo I found on a Grand Marais website this morning.

Coming soon: Mice!

Answers:
Betsy commented on the last post with a couple of questions. She probably could have figured out the answers to all of these by doing some clever internet searching but I'll save her the effort.
The Cavity Lake fire is far away from Sawbill, it's ~20 miles straight north of Sawbill. If the fire gets big enough to endanger Sawbill Canoe Outfitters it will have burned up most of the BWCA. However, they can easily see the smoke plume at Sawbill and occasionally can smell the smoke. The fire has burned to the north side of Gabimichigami Lake which is one lake to the north of Little Saganaga.
Apparently it has consumed 31 square miles of BWCA and 60 campsites have been "destroyed" but no one has been hurt. MPR reported this morning that the Forest Service was keeping several groups of canoeists in the woods rather than letting them try to exit through Sea Gull lake which is surrounded by the fire. Apparently they're making a plan to supply them with food if that becomes necessary.
The fire was started last Thursday by a lightning strike.
The "blowdown" comment refers to the area affected by a large windstorm in July of 1999 (the same weekend we moved into this house). It was a "straight line wind" that carved a long narrow (like 40-50 miles long by around 10 miles wide) swath between Ely MN and Gunflint lake. Most of the large trees in this area were blown flat and now provide lots of fuel for fires.

The above picture was taken shortly after the storm.
Here's a link to a map of the BWCA showing the blowdown area:
http://www.ra.dnr.state.mn.us/bwca/maps/bwcawind_low.gif
This fire is burning right in the northeast end of the blowdown area. There may be some controversy brewing because it looks like the Forest Service may have chosen early on to let the fire burn to consume some of the fuel in the blowdown area so that it wouldn't be available for future fires. If it gets out of hand I'm sure the conspiracy theorists will go wild.
On the east side of the fire there is a barrier where they have done controlled burns over the last five years. The idea with the controlled burns is they set small fires (in the winter when they can control them) to burn up the available fuel. That way if there is a fire in the area there are ready made barriers to keep the fire from spreading. So because of these controlled burns they think they can keep the fire from going very far to the east (outside the BWCA) where the Gunflint Trail and lots of cabins, lodges and outfitters are.
It appears that the main concern at this point is that it will spread to the North into Canada and the Quetico wilderness. That area is more remote and I think harder to access than where it is right now. Canada has been helping to fight the fires, the yellow twin engine fire bombers in the pictures you can link to from my last post are Canadian firefighting airplanes. They had to pull them out today to fight some other fire in Ontario.
On an unrelated note I got an email asking about the photo in my profile. That is Senor Mumbato, the iconic actor from such films as "The Curse of Senor Mumbato"

I'm at work so this will be short.
There's a good sized forest fire burning at the end of the Gunflint Trail mostly in the Boundary Waters. It's called the Cavity Lake fire.
It's many miles from our property.
Here's a link to some pictures.
http://www.boreal.org/fireinfo/Cavity_Lake_Fire/photo_gallery.html
And here's the DNR site for the fire, it's a bit awkward but there's some good info there if you're patient enough to find it.
http://www.mnics.org/Incidents/fire_2.shtml

One thing that's nice to do in the summer when it's hot is to go down in the nice cool basement and play pinball. Sadly that's also when all the dumbasses in the city think they need to air condition their houses down to 67 degrees. Right now our "120" AC power is running at 103 volts, I blame this on the excess power draw from all the air conditioners. The result is that you can turn the pinball machines on but when you try to use a flipper the power draw pulls the regulated +5VDC down and the computer resets. This makes for annoyingly short games.
I don't really understand why people think they need to have air conditioning in this state. I think I'm actually less comfortable at work in the AC than I would be without it, going back and forth from hot to cold every day is just annoying. I'd rather be hot all the time.
I hate air conditioning. Somebody should make a law or something.

It's hot here. It was supposed to be 100f today. I don't think it got that hot more like mid-90s. Either way it sucks. It was 100 yesterday.
I was going to go up to the lake this weekend but I decided to stay home and work on the kitchen instead. Turns out it was too hot to spend any time in the garage without having a heat stroke so I didn't get much done. I probably would have been more productive working on the retaining wall up at the lake. However the local TV stations keep interrupting 60 Minutes and The Simpsons to talk about the tornado warning for Lake and Cook counties. Apparently a tornado went past Eagle Mountain a little while ago, that's about 5 miles from both of our properties. Sandy is hoping that the "cabin" will get blown down. If that happens we'll probably wish we had insurance on it so we could get some cash to build a new place.
Speaking of building a new place here's a website with some interesting houses we might want to try to model our place after...
http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/index.htm
Interestingly the Small House Society is based in Iowa City, or at least that's their PO box address...
FYI they're talking about Ronnie WooWoo on ESPN right now during the Cubs game.
We might be getting ready to walk the dog over to the lake so she can go for a nice wade. Also there's a Dairy Queen over there.
Remind me not to linger around the garage at Dad and Kathie's cabin...

Henrycentrism:
Betsy and Pete popped in for a visit last week.









If you don't pay too much attention to me, it looks like Henry is going really fast.












Now, you might be thinking that Henry perpetually sticks his tounge out when he's riding a bike. That's not entirely true, he will occasionally pull it in so that he can say "bike!" Lucy however does stick her tounge out when she wants a turn.
OK here are the last two.

OK, so as you can tell from the previous post we were up at the lake over 4th of July weekend. Actually the main purpose of our trip was to attend the Sawbill Canoe Outfitters 50th anniversary reunion. You can check it out at
http://sawbill.com/www/news/newsletter/index.cfm
Depending on when you see this you may have to scroll down a bit to find the section about the reunion, but there are some pictures of both Sandy and me.
We had a great time visiting with all the former and current crewmembers although many of the people we worked with couldn't make it this time. I made 40 gallons of beer for the party, I chose to make a pale ale. It turned out pretty well but wasn't as good as I had hoped it would be. The PA I made for Rob and Carrie's wedding was much better.
We also spent a few days at our property. Since we bought the place I've been working on building a dry stone retaining wall along the "driveway." When it's done it will be about 45' long and 3'-4.5' tall. After this weekend I've got about 20' started but need to build it up higher. Here's what it looks like right now, foreshortening makes it look less impressive but I can't get it all in the shot unless I stand at the end like this.

I spent most of the time we were there this weekend working on the wall. Sandy worked on the deck.

The framing for the deck was built by the previous owners, apparently it was supposed to be part of the house but (like many other things) they never finished it. We're turning it into a deck by covering it with wood that we can scavenge from inside the cabin, it's mostly tounge and groove knotty pine and 1" aspen planks both of which were used on the interior walls. The deck ends up being a bit of a mosaic because of the odd lengths and widths but it gives a more or less level place to put the tent and it has a nice view. If you look at the left foreground of the picture you can see what I mean by mosaic, I refer to it as the interesting part of the deck.

Frogs 1, slugs 0.
This appears to be a Hyla versicolor eating some kind of gross slug. It showed up on our deck on our lake property last weekend.