Can anyone report on what the burn area on Insula and Hudson looks like from a 2023 trip. All I can find are old reports.

I was in Insula last June for several days, paddled up through the Numbered lakes to get there. Pretty tough on the south end of insula, once you get near the Rock and rorth everything is fine. There are a couple of campsites on some islands near the rock that escaped the burn, but many of the burn areas are still fairly treeless. You could camp on them, but I wouldn't want to spend a lot of time there. On the positive side, every place we fished in insula had fish.

I didn't make it into Insula, age and injuries prevented that portage but I did get to Hudson. The burn area there is recovering nicely with jackpines making up ht bulk of the trees. I'd estimate them to be 12 to 15 feet tall now and "as thick as the hairs on a dog's back". While I can lament the loss of the trees that the fire destroyed, this area needed a refreshing as the jackpine had reached the end of their lives and were dying to be replaced with balsam fir and birch. As the new jackpine grow they will self thin, leaving room underneath for red and white pines to become established. Areas that had previously had no jackpine to leave seeds for regrowth will become populated with birch and aspen.