Among many wildfires covered, Ham Lake caused the most heartache

By John Myers jmyers@duluthnews.com

Starting in the droughty summer of 1988, and ever since then, I have been one of the News Tribune’s primary forest fire beat reporters.

I even have the yellow Nomex shirt and green pants, with some black char stains in places, to prove it.

Something about wildfires and the people who fight them draw me in. The stories can be fascinating, fast-paced, heartbreaking and just plain interesting all at once. There’s a science to wildfires that involves climate and meteorology and forestry and then a military science-like effort to put them out, with the battle fought on land and in the air.

Fires are also confusingly contradictory, at once destroying and renewing. Where a decade ago a wildfire area might have looked blackened and bleak, it now supports a lush new forest, better for moose and blueberries.

I’ve covered some of the region’s biggest fires of recent decades: Alpine Lake in 2005, Cavity Lake in 2006, Pagami Creek in 2011, the Germann Road fire in Wisconsin in 2013 and myriad smaller ones, too.

But in sheer scale of destruction of people’s homes, cabins and property — of disrupting and endangering people’s lives — nothing in the last 79 years in Minnesota can top the Ham Lake fire of May 2007.

It was just after noon Tuesday, May 8, when I was standing along the Gunflint Trail, near Gunflint Lake, at a roadblock formed by Cook County sheriff’s deputies and U.S. Forest Service personnel. It was as far as anyone not fighting the Ham Lake fire, just a few miles up the road at that point, was allowed to go.

The fire had already been raging for three days and most of the area had been evacuated. But authorities were bowing to pressure from home and cabin

Continued on page 34 owners to allow them to return to where the fire had already burned through to retrieve valuables and confirm damage. And for a couple of hours that day, as the fire seemed to settle down, property owners were allowed in for one hour under law enforcement escort.

I was standing with Larry Oakes, a reporter from the Minneapolis Star Tribune (a cohort and friend), when we struck up a conversation with Grand Marais artist Jan Sivertson. She was waiting for her turn to drive to her cabin on Sea Gull Lake.

We asked Siverston if we could join her. Sure, she said, why not? So the two reporters crammed into the back seat, kept a low-profile, cleared the roadblack and were on our way behind the lines of the fire.

The sound of helicopters and airplanes dropping water on fire was constant while we were there. Smoke was thick in the air and there were small fires burning as far as you could see.

We were only at the cabin site for about 20 minutes when the Border Patrol agent who escorted us to the site, a Texan with a thick drawl, came running up the driveway and told us we need to get out of there fast. The fire was coming back at us.

Here’s part of the story I wrote that ran in the next day’s News Tribune:

Jan Sivertson didn’t cry Tuesday afternoon as she pulled into the driveway of what had been her cabin.

Only a pile of ash and disfigured rubble remained under a formerly blue metal roof that had been scorched white by the raging Sunday run of the Ham Lake fire.

“Oh my God,” Sivertson said in a hushed voice. “It’s gone.”

Sivertson already knew that. She had been told by sheriff’s deputies and even chartered a plane to fly over the rubble on Monday. But when she saw it up close, the devastation sunk in.

Everything had burned. Glasses melted into disfigured shapes. Even the outhouse is gone — tipped over in the fire’s wind and burned horizontal to the ground. Kayaks stored under the cabin. Artwork. Nothing was salvageable. Most everything was reduced to ash.

“I cried in private at home. ... Now, it’s just sort of numbing,” Sivertson said while walking around the site.

Still, the Grand Marais resident — known for her art gallery — said she’s excited that many of her tall jack pines appeared to have survived the fire. The cabin site sits high on a rock overlooking scenic Seagull Lake, which has been ringed by fires in recent years.

“We can rebuild the cabin, but these trees,” she said. “Once this gets cleaned up, it still looks like a good view.”

Sivertson said she had already made the decision to rebuild the cabin, which she built the first time in 1989. But not yet.

“Not right away. I’m not emotionally equipped,” she said. “I want to let the dust settle.”

As firefighting helicopters and aircraft flew low overhead dropping water on nearby hotspots, still trying to save other cabins only a few miles down the road, Sivertson said she had planned to open the cabin this weekend — when she would turn on her sprinkler system.

Like several other property owners in the area, she never had a chance to turn on the sprinklers.

“I thought I would at least have a day to come and set it up when a fire started. But that didn’t happen,” she said. The fire moved that fast.

Sivertson’s cabin was one of more than 40 structures that burned near the Gunflint Trail on Sunday afternoon and evening when the Ham Lake fire raged out of control. More than 50 cabins, homes and businesses were saved by a combination of sprinkler systems and firefighters pumping water.

Sivertson and Carol deSain, who owns a cabin across a bay on Seagull Lake that was spared by the fire, were escorted to Seagull Lake by a U.S. Border Patrol officer just after 1 p.m. Their visit was cut short when fire officials felt it was becoming unsafe to remain at the end of the Gunflint Trail.

Sivertson and DeSain were the last car allowed in and out on Tuesday as smoke filled the air.

“Sooner or later, we won’t have to worry about fire any more,” Sivertson said, looking out at a landscape of miles and miles of scorched trees. “Everything is going to be burned.”

Just down the road, Corrine and Joe Sierakowski were allowed back to their retirement home on tiny Gull Lake between Seagull and Saganaga lakes after noon Tuesday. They had hoped to stay a while and repair some sprinklers that were dousing their home and yard with a soaking stream of lake water. But they had to leave quickly.

“We had fire a couple hundred feet from the house,” Corrine said. “I wanted to stay and do more. But when a helicopter is dropping water a few hundred feet away, I thought we better get the heck out of there.”

Sierakowski said she was amazed at how green the grass and trees were in the zone around their home that had been saturated by the sprinklers. Yet everything outside that zone was burned and black.

“We had daffodils and ducks on the pond and the fire was still burning in the background,” she said.

Dick and Kris Gillespie didn’t know for sure Tuesday morning if their cabin on Saganaga Lake was still standing. A Sheriff’s Department hotline said their fire number matched a building that was undamaged by fire, but the Gillespies, of Minneapolis, also heard several cabins on their shore had burned.

On Tuesday morning, they by chance met News Tribune photographer Clint Austin, who had flown over the fire area the day before. Austin used his laptop computer to show the couple dozens of photographs he had taken of the fire area.

“There it is!” Kris exclaimed with joy upon seeing a photo of their apparently unscathed twoyear-old cabin.

But the couple’s joy turned to grief. They say their neighbors’ cabins on both sides had burned to the ground. They were overcome with grief.

“Oh, poor Bill,” Kris said of her neighbor. The burned cabin on one side was only 20 feet from the Gillespie’s undamaged garage. u

Reporter’s note: The Ham Lake fire picked up over the next two days and eventually turned east, forcing the evacuation of the Gunflint Lake area and even the Forest Service’s firefighting command center. Calm winds, cooler temperatures, rain and hundreds of firefighters officially contained the fire 12 days later.

About the Ham Lake fire

Started: May 5, 2007, declared contained May 20.

Burned: Across 76,000 acres — 118 square miles — in Minnesota and Ontario.

Damaged or destroyed: 136 structures in Minnesota and 15 in Ontario. In Minnesota, 6 were permanent homes; 22 were seasonal homes or cabins; 34 were cabins at a youth camp; the rest were garages, sheds and outbuildings.

Cost: About $11 million for the federal firefighting effort. Cook County’s assessed value of lost structures was at least $3.7 million, although that number is widely considered to be grossly undervalued.

Cause: Unattended campfire on the shore of Ham Lake. A Washington, D.C., man who had been canoeing in the area was eventually indicted by a federal grand jury for letting the campfire get out of control. He later took his own life before his trial began.

Context: No one was killed or seriously injured in the fire. But at the time, it was the largest wildfire in Minnesota since 1931 in acreage, lost buildings and financial damage. Since then, the 2011 Pagami Creek fire, at 92,000 acres in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, is now the largest fire in recent state history, although no private structures were damaged.