A Little History...

A toasty campfire is both a success, and a responsibility. It is your job to properly maintain and extinguish your campfire to preserve the beautiful wilderness for others to enjoy.

Fire!

Perhaps the most feared event in the Northwoods is a forest fire. The most important thing to remember during a fire is that EVERYONE on the Trail works to help the firefighters. At Gunflint Lodge that generally means providing meals and lodging. Activities during the 2007 Ham Lake Fire illustrate what goes into this.

Our first indication that the Forest Service needed help was a request to provide meals for fire fighters. This usually starts out small, like maybe 50 people on the first Saturday in May of 2007. At that time of the year there is not nearly as much food at the lodge as there would be in August. So on Sunday Bruce was sent to Sam’s Club in Duluth with a long list to just get us through Sunday and Monday until a food delivery came Monday afternoon. The fifteen-passenger van was filled to the top. By Monday we were feeding over two hundred people for each meal.

The days quickly fell into a routine. Curtis and Bill had a buffet of fruit, scrambled eggs, hash browns, meat, and French toast ready to go at 5:30 a.m. The day’s bag lunches were lined up on the front porch to be picked up after breakfast. Sue was baking the snack (brownies or Hudson Bay Bread) to be packed in the next day’s lunch. As soon as breakfast was over, Bill and Curtis started prepping for the next day. Among other things that meant cracking enough eggs to fill two five-gallon pails.

About 10:00 a.m. the neighbors started to gather in the dining room to pack bag lunches for the next day. Half the group assembled the bags with snacks, fruit, beverage, and chips. Brown paper bags were for regular lunches and white plastic bags were for vegetarian lunches. The other half worked on sandwiches – two per person. Meat and cheese were pretty easy but the vegetarian peanut butter and jelly were more difficult. When we were feeding 500 people, someone had to make 100 PB&J sandwiches.

Dinner was another buffet with salad, bread, meat, fish, vegetables, potatoes, dessert and beverages. Everyone ate quickly and left immediately to get some sleep. They were tired and so were we after all the cooking. When the Forest Service caterers arrived on Thursday, we were happy to turn the meals over to them. If it wasn’t for the fact of a forest fire in the neighborhood, feeding the Forest Service was an interesting change from what we normally do.