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.