Minnesota—Within the Superior National Forest, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness attracts thousands of visitors every year who rely on hundreds of portage trails as they travel its pristine waters. Portages are humanmade structures such as wooden staircases designed to minimize erosion over steep terrain as they create paths between waterbodies in the wilderness.  

Wilderness rangers in the BWCAW continually monitor conditions of hundreds of portage trails. In northern Minnesota, the boreal forest climate includes cyclical freezing and thawing patterns that wear down and decompose soil and other elements. Add the human factor into this heavily traveled natural area and erosion increases. Eventually, humanmade structures like wooden staircases wear down and need replacing. 

Such is the case for one popular portage on Superior’s Gunflint Ranger District that connects Duncan and Rose lakes. Wilderness rangers noticed the stairway was becoming unsafe, and in the summer of 2022, work began to rebuild it. The effort involved hundreds of work hours by employees, a contractor, students and dog sled teams. 

The first stage, completed by Forest Service employees, involved dismantling and removing two rotting wood staircases by hand (a total of 130 feet of stairs). This took about 100 work hours. Since the work is located in the BWCAW, only hand tools were used and no motorized equipment. The demolition materials were then piled near the portage until they could be backhauled out of the wilderness during the winter by dog sled teams.

The old staircases were made of treated lumber, so to improve the primitive wilderness character, promote sustainable trail building techniques and protect water quality, they were replaced with a rock check dam style portage. The photo on the right shows a close up of a completed rock check with smaller rock fill and rock retaining walls. This style of portage steps restores the natural look and function on the landscape, resembling rock steps designed to last longer and channel rainwater down the steps to the lake. A professional trail builder and five students from the Conservation Corps of Minnesota and Iowa spent about one month constructing over 130 check dams from native stone. 

The last stage of the project took place in January 2023, when a cadre of Superior’s wilderness rangers and their sled dogs came together from across the forest. The mushers are Forest Service employees who own sled dogs and help with winter work. In a unique program, the dogs were signed up under volunteer agreements as working dog volunteers.

Using two teams of 10 sled dogs, the crew made 26 separate trips (each four miles roundtrip), for a total of 180 hours and removed the waste materials from the wilderness. Making the task even more challenging, they performed the work during difficult winter conditions, including deep snow and exceptionally cold temperatures where wind chills rarely exceeded -30° F.

“An experience I had while helping complete this project, was just how meaningful that stairway is to so many people. Numerous folks stopped by to see the physical pile of lumber from the old stairway as it was being hauled out; commenting on what the history and memory of those pieces of wood, and that physical location represented to each of them,” said Tom Roach, Wilderness & Recreation Monitoring Staff and Wilderness Sled Dog Program. “Not being from this area or having walked that staircase in the past, it was evident what a place of significance that portage is to many people.” 

The project was made possible through a variety of funding sources, including the Great American Outdoors Act, BWCAW use permit fees, Timber Sales Pipeline Restoration Fund and Secure Rural Schools grants. 
Forest visitors and the wilderness condition will benefit from these efforts, as the popular portage site has been greatly improved and will now withstand many more years of use thanks to the staff, volunteers, partners, and sled teams that helped make this project possible.