Fire

Alpine Lake fire burning on more than 1,000 acres

Associated Press

ON SEAGULL LAKE, Minn. - The largest fire the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness has seen in a decade was burning over 1,000 acres in far northeastern Minnesota on Thursday.

But partly due to cooler and humid weather, the Alpine Lake fire didn't move much.

The fire was considered 15 percent contained Thursday afternoon, up from 5 percent contained on Wednesday, according to the Minnesota Interagency Fire Center. The fire was more than 1,100 acres - about 200 of which was intentionally burned.

Also Thursday, about a dozen Seagull Lake property owners crossed the lake in boats to prevent firefighters from setting a "burn-out fire, designed to control the wildfire.

A Cook County sheriff's deputy stopped them and told them to meet with fire officials, said Gil Knight, a U.S. Forest Service fire information officer.

"It turned out there was a miscommunication, a misunderstanding about where we intended to do this burn," Knight said.

The property owners thought the burn-out was going to alter a piece of shoreline known as the "palisades," on the lake's northwest side.

"It's very picturesque, on a peninsula," said Leanne Adams, president of the Seagull-Sag Area Property Owners Association. "Since the (1999) blowdown and subsequent prescribed burns, people have seen the shoreline change so much that they become concerned when they hear that anything more might happen to the shoreline."

Fire officials said they planned to burn near a different portion of shoreline.

"Some residents are understandably upset about further destruction of the shoreline, while we're doing our best to prevent a potential disaster to their properties," Knight said.

Knight said fire officials plan to meet each morning with property owners to hear their concerns.

"People are torn," Adams said. "They know back-burning needs to be done, but then it's hard to think about having to live with that blackened landscape. But most of us trust that the Forest Service in general has our best interests at heart."

Late Thursday afternoon, the burn-out was 75 percent complete.

The roughly triangular fire stretched from Alpine Lake to the west to Grandpa Lake to the northeast and along the northern shore of Seagull Lake to the east. The sparsely populated Gunflint Trail is about four miles east of Seagull lake.

Center spokeswoman Cynthia Sage said Thursday the fire was moving northwest, away from the houses and lodges on the Gunflint Trail toward an uninhabited wilderness area along Red Rock Lake.

The fire started July 30 between Alpine and Seagull lakes, northwest of Grand Marais.

Sage said aircraft that had been used in the past few days weren't flying on Thursday. She said she wasn't sure why, but guessed it had to do with cost and the direction of the fire.

The number of firefighters working on the fire rose to 210 on Thursday, up from about 180 on Wednesday. Some of the firefighters were working out of new temporary camps on the west end of the fire. A 10-person crew was also at a camp on Grandpa Lake.

More than 20 campsites remained closed in the area around Red Rock, Alpine, Grandpa and Seagull lakes. Fire officials have said they expected that it would take about two more weeks to get the fire under control.