The “Incident” in Ely, Minnesota

I pushed a cart loaded with bottled water along an aisle in the small grocery store. Stopping, I reached toward a shelf of candles when the store suddenly went dark!

Welcome to Ely, Minnesota and the aftermath of the area’s infamous 1999 “incident”.

We’d traveled to northern Minnesota to spend close to a week in a quiet bed and breakfast on Farm Lake at the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW), a few miles outside of Ely.

We first stopped at Piragis, an outfitter in town where we’d reserved two canoes for the week’s stay.

It looked like rain as we picked up our canoes and strapped them to the top of our SUV for the short drive to the Blue Heron Bed & Breakfast.

We took off from Piragis and quickly found ourselves in the middle of a raging rainstorm, accompanied by straight line winds that threatened to blow our rented boats away into the wilderness!

The boats seemed to pull in every direction. Tim stopped and hopped out of our Mountaineer to make sure the boats were secure, and got completely drenched in less than a few minutes outside of the car.

The storm seemed pretty much over by the time we reached our B&B.

The B&B owner rejoiced when she saw us make it up her long driveway because that meant she wouldn’t have to get her chain saw out to clear the drive of fallen trees that night.

By the time we’d unloaded the boats and visited the grocery store in town, our B&B lost power. The candles and bottled water we purchased came in handy until the B&B's power came back on the next day.

The rest of our trip turned out relaxing and relatively unaffected by the storm’s effects.

Other Ely residents and visitors weren’t so fortunate.

The infamous Fourth of July Blowdown in 1999 fell 600 square miles of forest and caused millions of dollars of in damage in northern Minnesota alone.

The storm, also known as the Boundary Waters-Canadian Derecho, lasted 22 hours and roiled over 1,300 miles. Records show that any other storm going back to the early 18^th century paled in comparison with the Fourth of July Blowdown in terms of size and force. More than 40 percent of the total BWCAW felt the storm’s effects, with some areas losing every mature tree to the winds that reached as much as 80 to 100 miles per hour.

We heard stories throughout the week of our visit about groups of chain-saw wielding neighbors and volunteers clearing not only driveways, but paths to canoeists stranded (and some even injured) deep in the wilderness and unable to paddle or portage out.

Some area residents and businesses waited several days for power to come back on.

I remember eating at a nearby restaurant where staff improvised with a few generator-powered appliances and grills to feed hungry guests, while other guests at a nearby resort “roughed it” by convincing their hosts to let them plug their blenders into a generator long enough to mix a few batches of margaritas!

The day after the storm, a morning mist floated over glass-like Farm Lake as we launched our canoes past the wild rice near the shore for a quiet paddle.

I snapped a few photos of the destruction we saw throughout our visit, with fields of towering trees snapped off like matchsticks about 15 feet high and crews working to clear fallen timber from the roads.

Short as the storm seemed to us at the time, the aftermath of the 1999 Blowdown created long-lasting and detrimental effects on the area’s environment. Scientists, naturalists and other researchers continue to debate those effects today as the event’s tenth anniversary approaches.

Changes in the environment resulted in an especially increased risk for wildfires. One notable event occurred in July of 2006, when a lightning strike resulted in a wildfire burning 367,000 acres of the 1999 Blowdown area—or 3 percent of the total 1.1 million acres of BWCAW.

We wondered about the area’s recovery from the storm and planned a visit to Ely this summer. Unfortunately, the personal economic storm we’re weathering changed our plans.

We hope to visit Ely in the next couple of years.

Meanwhile, we continue to wonder how the forests so badly damaged then appear now and wish the best for the residents of the area as they continue to address the concerns caused by “the incident”.

© Dominique King 2009 All rights reserved