ELY – The Blueberry Festival is off.

People are displaced from their homes. Vacations are scrambled.

And the entire Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness remains shut down. And on this side of the wilderness, it could be a while before it reopens, fire experts and staff from the U.S. Forest Service said this weekend.

And still, Ely is here and open for business. Don’t give up on the summer in this town, locals are saying in this gateway to the Boundary Waters.

These are some of the realities and talking points in recent days here in what’s commonly called the canoe capital of the world. The BWCA was shut down Tuesday, July 14. A series of approximately 1,000 lightning strikes on July 6 sparked off nearly 20 wildfires across Superior National Forest, including multiple large fires that remain active in the BWCA Wilderness.

The impact of the fires, along with subsequent closures and cancellations, is widespread across the Boundary Waters region. The impact is felt from the Gunflint Trail to Crane Lake. The epicenter of it all, though, is here in Ely.

We’re still open, local businesses in Ely are hoping people understand. This basic fact has been shared frequently since the news of the closures spread nationwide last week. A similar sentiment emanates from the tourism bureau in Cook County– the notion that a closure of the BWCA does not mean a shutdown of the busy summer season along the North Shore and beyond.

The closure of the BWCA is unfolding in multiple ways, and one outfitter up the Gunflint Trail told me Sunday morning (July 19) before I left for Ely that there must be some type of middle ground among the many feelings, wants, and needs of those impacted by the wildfires and closures, that sum totaling into the many tens of thousands. There’s a need to keep people safe, and there’s a need to keep local businesses up and running. That’s the tension.

What we know with certainty is that the BWCA Wilderness will remain closed through at least Friday, July 24. For the first time publicly, Forest Supervisor Tom Hall alluded to the fact Sunday night (July 19) that the wilderness is likely to reopen in sections. Areas absent of fire will reopen first, Hall said during a town hall in Ely Sunday night.

Forest Supervisor Tom Hall during the July 19 meeting in Ely. Photo by Joe Friedrichs

Heading into the second week of the BWCA closure, everyone wants information. Sometimes it isn’t there. There’s been a lack of information about the Little Knife Fire burning west of Seagull and Saganaga lakes at the end of the Gunflint Trail, some are pleading. Others say fire maps are confusing for some people, or the maps aren’t updated frequently enough. (Note: Paddle & Portage asked for specifics on the Little Knife Fire Sunday night at the town hall and Forest Service personnel said the fire is not as active at this time as the Ely fires, and more information will be coming Monday during a town hall on the Gunflint Trail at 3 p.m.)

Meanwhile, one thing that’s certain is that media are everywhere, though often repeating some version of the same story. A number of the reporters are from outside the area. Locals are being asked questions by reporters who they don’t know personally, or who they know only through TV, radio, or as bylines in newspapers. Broadly speaking, tensions are high across the region. It’s understandable. The summer wasn’t supposed to go this way. There’s not someone at the town hall meetings who has the answer to when the BWCA will reopen. Not yet, anyway.  

Beyond that, there are acts of kindness happening daily, with people opening their homes to those displaced by the evacuations. Money is arriving in the form of online purchases to businesses impacted by the closures, while others are handing over $500 on top of their deposits for cancelled reservations. Food, time, energy, and resources are being shared. Generosity and gratitude are present, sharing the stage with feelings of angst and frustration.

There wasn’t a single canoe on top of a vehicle driving down Ely’s main drag, Sheridan Street, Sunday afternoon. The street itself was unusually calm when the outside air climbed to 85 degrees Fahrenheit at 4 p.m. There were collections of white, puffy clouds floating about. Nothing about the clouds seemed ominous. They were what Bob Ross might call “happy clouds.” Most of the heavy smoke that hung over Ely and the Boundary Waters moved out Sunday, a south wind shoving the bad air to the north, where large sections of Quetico Provincial Park continue to burn.

Two of the busiest places around town Sunday were the parking lots and grassy fields of the local high school in Ely and the campus of the community college. Firefighters from across the country have pitched their tents here. Wall tents and semi-trailers adorn the perimeter. A clueless stranger might think there’s a music festival happening nearby if they just rolled into town, though the only orchestral sounds here are humming generators or the occasional airplane flying in the distance.

Tents for firefighters on the local football field in Ely. Photo by Gabe Evenocheck for Paddle & Portage media

By Sunday evening the warm temperatures relented and a large crowd gathered in the auditorium of the Vermilion Community College. People came to hear an update from the incident command team brought in to manage the fire. It was also a chance to simply come together, away from the screens so many people are relying on for information as the fires continue to burn. Jason Zabokrtsky runs Ely Outfitting Co. and he was there, as was Chad Houde, the chief of the Ely Police Department. Steve Nelson from Spirit of the Wilderness was in the crowd, as was Abby Dare, a business owner in Ely who previously ran the local tourism bureau. There was Blayne Hall. Becky Rom. The list goes on. An estimated 275 people were in the crowd, Forest Service staff told me after the meeting. Hundreds more watched a live stream online.

Tanner Spicer, the president of the Ely Chamber of Commerce, shared an update on matters of importance, including the cancellation of the Blueberry Festival, Ely’s biggest annual event that was set to kick off next weekend.

“Bringing tens of thousands of additional visitors into the region during an active emergency was determined to be inconsistent with current public safety needs,” Spicer shared before the meeting Sunday night.

The normal vibes of summer are here in some aspect – warm weather, sweet corn for sale on the side of the road near Whiteside Park, ice cream cones downtown – but things are off. Even the most ardent supporters of tourism for the region must admit that. The fires present uncertainty for all of us around the Boundary Waters. We don’t know when this will end. Perhaps that shared understanding, however complex and troubling it may be, is where we come together. The unknown of what comes next is the common ground. That’s the ground all the parties involved are standing on as the new week arrives.

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