A bit of info about the various fires burning in Ontario this summer. Not sure if it's the biggest, but the fire in Woodland Caribou is 136,000 hectares or 336,000 acres or 525 square miles. Cool picture of it in the story. That's a big fire. The biggest fire burning in the US I believe is the Bootleg fire in Oregon, which is 400,000 acres. I don't recall the fire situation in Ontario being so bad in my memory. Makes that Delta Lake fire look kind of minor.


CBC fire update

Just wow.

The entire WCPP has been closed for quite a while.

Its hard to really imagine the size when its in an unpopulated area. The cloquet fire (1918), which you can see images online for size, was estimated at 250k acres... and may give you some perspective on size or at least gives me perspective since its an area I have been through many times.

I was up by WCPP some years ago in Pickle Lake. I was at a gas station getting a tire changed and this big guy dressed in flame retardant clothes and boots walked in. He saw me gazing at a gigantic map of northern Ontario.

We got to talking about the forest and the lakes. I was asking about the forest species and why all the trees were sort of smallish compared to Quetico and MN.

I don’t remember everything he said but what stood out was sort of funny. He said “Yah know, 30% of the boreal forest is laying flat on any given day.” What he meant to me was that forests are not the wild deep protected woods we see in our dreams.

It left an impression on me, as have the many walks through burns over the years. It is really sad and devastating to see these places burn. All the wildlife that dies, the trees, the ecology.

However, fire is part of the forest and is part of what makes them what we see today. To nature, a fire is just a blip in time. The last time I was up that way, I saw a lot of forest that needed to burn, it was such a tangle of downed trees. It does not surprise me that these things happen.
Tom

You even go from southern Quetico to the northern part, tree species start changing and start getting more balsam-spruce.