The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is truly an international wonder. Its 1,100 lakes, spanning the Minnesota-Ontario border, bring beauty, serenity, and vast solitude to the many visitors who go there.
About the Area
The nation's largest wilderness area east of the Mississippi -- but only barely east of it -- is the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW). Its 1.1 million acres anchor wildness in northern Minnesota. Like-sized Quetico Provincial Park adjoins the BWCAW in neighboring Ontario and together they form a 2-million-plus acre wildland complex that supports wolves, moose, deer, bear, lynx, beaver and the very symbol of the north woods, the loon.
Threats to the Area
Motors
For all its spectacular beauty, the BWCAW has never fully achieved across its area the most fundamental of wilderness protections: freedom from motors. They were grand-fathered in from the start and the start was the Wilderness Act of 1964. Motor boats remain on several of its lakes and motorized portages to take motor boats between them operate in two places. Pressure is relentless to retain that motorized use. And a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2002 even called for increasing it.
Logging
That same Senate candidate also called for harvesting some of the blown-down timber that's strewn across as much as a third of the wilderness after an epic 1999 windstorm leveled it. Apart from some early agitation to "salvage the timber rather than waste it," and never mind new logging roads in the wilderness, the call hasn't yet been taken seriously. But something else has: the threat of massive fires from the downed and drying wood. To avert an unmanageable fire, the U.S. Forest Service has undertaken a series of prescribed within the wilderness, with the full support of conservationists, to interrupt the potential fire path that might sweep eastward ahead of prevailing westerly winds and toward a concentration of homes.
Visitation
Visitation -- simple love of the place -- is a persistent threat to the BWCAW. It is the system's most popular wilderness, luring over a million canoeists every year.
Visit the BWCAW web site.
