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Town and Country Club of St. Paul
300 Mississippi River Blvd
St. Paul, Minnesota

Program

11:00 a.m.
Social Hour & Silent Auction

12:00 noon
Welcome: Douglas Wood, President, Board of Directors
Invocation: Rev. Thomas M. Dore, retired pastor

Luncheon

Remarks: Douglas Wood

Program

Sig’s Lonely Land: The Churchill River
Music: Sons of the Voyageurs

Menu

Entree choices are chicken, salmon or vegetarian.  Please indicate your choice when you reserve your place.

RSVP

Cost is $35 per person. Please respond by April 1, 2013 to 218-365-7890

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The exhibit entitled The Sigurd Olson Legacy: Wilderness, Writings and Wolves will run from May 19 through October 31, 2013.

Five components will make up the display, including a recreation of Sig’s writing
shack! Please plan to visit the Wolf Center and enjoy the exhibition.

The post Wolf Center Sig Legacy Exhibit appeared first on Listening Point Foundation.

While we can’t promise that you will write just like Sigurd Olson, we can promise the inspiration—the cabin, the foot trails, the lake itself. Douglas Wood, President of LPF and author of 30 books, will serve as instructor/ coordinator, providing a warm and welcoming environment for writing and sharing, and guiding discussions. Come and explore the concepts of writing about landscape and the natural world, about language, personal voice and style, the business of publishing, and of course the extended opportunity to enjoy the Point itself.

Dates: Sept 6 – 8, 2013
Cost: $535, includes both food and lodging. Adults only.
Please contact us for more information and to reserve your spot.

The post Writers’ Workshop Weekend Sept 6-8, 2013 appeared first on Listening Point Foundation.

The Value of Wilderness

Sigurd with Walter F. “Wallie” Hansen, one of his two partners in the Border Lakes Outfitting Company, formed in 1929

The wilderness canoe country is northern Minnesota’s greatest recreational asset. Outside of its beauty, uniqueness, historical significance and fishing, it has a quality that other lake and forest areas do not possess, its primitive character. This is the magnet that draws people, the fact that here alone in the Midwest one can still see country as it looked before settlement. Should this quality disappear, it would lose what millions have come to cherish in a land where wilderness is fast becoming a rarity.

Conservationists have been trying to save this quality of the BWCA for almost half a century. The efforts have been many, no matter what the threats, and the objectives always the same. The road program of the twenties, the power dam proposals, the raising of water levels and the logging of the shorelines, airplanes and airplane resorts, all had they not been curbed would have destroyed in each case the wilderness itself.

When one pictures what could have happened had one of these gone through, the dams of a great power complex, submerging lakes as deep as eighty feet along the border, drowning islands, rapids, waterfalls, beaches, and campsites, destroying forests and creating vast swamps and ugly sloughs far inland, there would have been little to protect today.

Greater use, however, brings its own hazards to the wilderness, especially when it means mechanization in the form of outboard motors, snowmobiles, and other craft or vehicles. It is my firm belief that mechanized use of any kind in this small area is
destructive of wilderness values and that it should be strictly regulated and in time eliminated entirely.

Opponents of such regulation point at Canada, saying it permits airplanes, airplane resorts, and unrestricted motor boat use, that we have lost business now going north. This may be true to a certain extent, but it must be recognized that the BWCA is only a million acres whereas Canada has hundreds of millions of acres of forested lakes and waterways accessible by air.

Due to its relatively small size, the BWCA cannot stand such types of use. Canada due to its vastness can absorb it. However, Ontario has banned snowmobiles in all its provincial parks including the Quetico as detrimental to wilderness values, fish and wildlife.

No one likes regulation, but regulation is mandatory when large numbers of people use any area. Fifty years ago there were no highway patrols, or stop and go signs, nor was there any need for zoning in towns and cities. We did not need regulations then but we do now. The BWCA as a part of a national forest needs such protection through zoning if it is to be properly administered and protected.

As our population increases, and it may double by the end of the century, with more leisure time and better transportation
facilities, pressures will become greater and greater. Our responsibility today is to plan as wisely as we can to preserve
the wilderness character of an area that belongs not only to us but to every man, woman, and child in the United States. This is
not a local issue but a national one, and whatever is done must reflect the needs of all the people. Our obligation is a great
one, to preserve this area unchanged for coming generations who will need it far more than us….

The Local Economy

The canoe outfitting business is a substantial and important source of income to the area. For some years I ran the Border Lakes Outfitting Company at Winton and know from personal experience that canoe parties leave good U.S. dollars not only with outfitters, but with motels, hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and stores.

A prominent local outfitter recently had his parties fill out a questionnaire as to the actual money spent on canoe trips, the final figure averaging about $40.00 per person. If this is a normal expenditure and there are 50,000 people going into the canoe country annually, it will amount to $2,000,000. There are indications that this figure might well be doubled and the U.S. Forest Service estimates that some 250,000 people use the Boundary Waters Canoe Area each season. For those who believe that canoeists leave little money, such figures are hard to contradict.

Camping as a form of recreation has exploded all over the United States. With better equipment, more leisure, and improved access, whole families are taking to the road and nothing will stop the trend. It is like the boom in skiing and the phenomenal growth of ski resorts. People have discovered that this is the best and most economical way to enjoy the country and canoe trips are part of the pattern. That is why they come in ever-increasing numbers and will continue as long as the canoe country retains its character as the only lake wilderness of its kind in the United States.

Multiple Use and Zoning

The concept of Multiple Use is a sound one and a major premise in management of the U.S. Forest Service. Only when it is understood, however, that all uses must not be practiced on every acre does it accomplish its true purpose. In the
congressional act establishing this broad concept, wilderness is specifically recognized as a legitimate use in all national forests.

One fact that is usually overlooked is that the Boundary Waters Canoe Area is only the upper third of the Superior National Forest and that the balance of over two million acres of land and water can be used for recreational developments of all kinds in accordance with Forest Service planning and protection, scenic roads, resorts and lodges, snowmobile trails, free outboard motor use, timber utilization and mining. In this much larger part of the forest all such utilization is possible.

The slogan of “Saving our Wilderness through Multiple Use” is sound only in the proper application of the concept, but is absolutely erroneous if it means the kind of management and utilization allowed in the rest of the forest. The wilderness was here long before white men came, needs no logging or mechanized use to survive, only protection. Those who believe that through a continuation of timber harvesting and other adverse uses the wilderness can be saved violate the true concept of zoning.

Correctly interpreted, the idea of zoning the canoe country for wilderness use and relegating all other uses to the major part of the forest is the only hope for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. If it is to remain unchanged and inviolate this is the only course and not too much to ask for the American people.

The post “Wilderness Canoe Country: Minnesota’s Greatest Recreational Asset” appeared first on Listening Point Foundation.

You can help preserve this historical site!

The passage of time and the weathering effects of the elements are taking their toll on the Listening Point structures. In 2009 Sig’s cedar dock needed to be replaced. Last year we restored the cabin’s iconic stone steps and a section of the fireplace hearth. In addition, the entire stone foundation of the cabin was rebuilt. Exactly re-positioning each stone required a special touch and know-how. Now Sig’s sauna is showing signs of decline.

Listening Point was the key to Sigurd Olson’s heart and soul. For a quarter century it provided him the insights, inspiration and perspective that helped him to become one of the leading literary and conservation voices of his era.

The Listening Point Foundation Board of Directors has created a fund dedicated to the long-term maintenance of the Point. If we are able to raise $15,000, a generous supporter has agreed to match that amount. To date, individuals have given more than $9000 toward this goal. Now, we need to hear from you! Would you please consider donating to the Listening Point Preservation Fund today, thus doubling the impact of your investment in the Point?  Just click the Donate button at the top and fill in the amount at PayPal.

With your help, we can preserve the natural and historic integrity of Listening Point in perpetuity, so that it can continue to serve future generations as a place of inspiration and a symbol of wilderness, just as it did for Sig.

The post Preserving Listening Point appeared first on Listening Point Foundation.

Black Bear Island Lake in Saskatchewan. Photo by Mahaffey

One day in the Far North we fought a gale on Black Bear Lake of the Churchill River in Saskatchewan. It was a glorious sunny day and along the muskegs the air was alive with the screaming of gulls and terns, a day that made up for the drenching storms, treacherous rapids, and portages we had known for a week.

Black Bear was a magnificent body of water, the shores high and rocky and covered with the dark green of jackpine and spruce, the valleys in lighter shades of aspen, birch, and willow. In places, the glaciated shores of the Canadian Shield were silvery grey with caribou moss and some of the rocks were splashed vividly with orange. Then we passed through a narrows, left the mainland with its vistas and waves, and found ourselves in a veritable maze of islands and intricate channels where it was still and reflections were all around us.

Here was a different world, a world removed from bold headlands, purple horizons, and winds, and as we paddled on, our minds became part of it and we sensed the mystery and charm of all islands, a sense of being part of something permanent and unchanged. Here was silence and shelter.

Toward late afternoon we drifted toward a small spruce-grown island a few miles from a rapids we must run or portage the next day.  There we decided to camp.

No one, as far as we could tell, had ever stopped there before, no axe marks or scuffed moss, no blackened stones of an old fireplace. We were possibly the first and felt like intruders coming to a sacred place. We left no mark of our passing, built a small fire in a rocky cleft near the water’s edge, pitched the tent on a level spot thick with sphagnum in an opening among  the spruces, tying the tent ropes to two small trees, anchoring the corners with rocks, careful not to disturb the lichens growing on them. We would leave our sanctuary as we found it, clean and unchanged.

It was an untouched microcosm, this island. The great fires that were in constant evidence on the mainland all over the north, through some miracle had passed it by. After supper we sat on a flat ledge above the fire and looked out over the islands around us. Hemmed in as we were, there was no sunset, but the sky above was angry with swirling black clouds streaked with yellow that could mean wind in the morning. It was good to be on an island again — almost like being on a ship at sea.

The deep sphagnum in the spruces proved that nothing had changed for a century or more and its ecology had reached a stage of permanence rare in northern latitudes. Even though the shores of the big lake seemed relatively unchanged by recent burns, few places were as pristine as this. On this tiny pinnacle of hard resistant granite that had survived millions of years of erosion and glacial polishing, time had stopped.

Around us were many islands, little ones no larger than rafts, slivers of rock rounded by the glacier like the backs of black surfacing whales, crooked ones with beaches tucked into quiet bays, larger ones with cliffs and spruces pinnacled against the sky. You could lose yourself quickly here, for channels led to hidden places no other eyes had seen. Their solitudes were ours alone.

All islands of the Canadian Shield, wherever they happen to be in the Quetico-Superior or the Far North, have this sense of remoteness and genius of place that makes them seem different than ordinary terrain. Here one finds a sense of perspective and of being more intimately involved with all life and undisturbed ecological progression than anywhere else, a becoming  art of the cosmic cycles that govern all. This is one reason they are important, but there are other reasons, too, reasons more than beauty, remoteness, or charm. It is a better understanding of the intimate interrelationships of all forms of life upon them. Only through the building of knowledge from the microcosm beneath the forest floor to the inter-dependence of all things growing upon them can we really become aware of their true value.

The work of an ecologist like Miron Heinselman and others who have devoted their lives to the study of habitats and living forms in all their complex relationships, helps us know what any island means. Only by knowing their uniqueness can we be successful in preserving them. The Nature Conservancy in preserving some untouched islands in the Superior National Forest and on Lake Superior, the cooperation of the U.S. Forest Service, the Department of Natural Resources of Minnesota, and the vital interest of environmental groups will make this possible so people of the future will be able to see what they looked like before our coming.

Donne said, “No man is an island unto himself.” No truer words were ever spoken, for any island is a part of the whole. By knowing an island you know all wilderness.

The post Wild Islands of the Shield appeared first on Listening Point Foundation.

By Kevin Proescholdt

It’s official: Listening Point, the land and cabin on Burntside Lake near Ely that provided respite and inspiration for conservationist and author Sigurd F. Olson, has been named to the National Register of Historic Places.

“We are delighted by this official recognition of the importance of both Sigurd Olson and of Listening Point,” said Chuck Wick of Ely, Vice-Chair of the Listening Point Foundation and a lifelong friend of Olson’s.  “On the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Listening Point Foundation, it is a strong validation by the federal government of the importance of our work.”

“Not every property nominated makes it to the National Register,” explained Tim Rudnicki, Chair of the Listening Point Foundation. “We
submitted a lengthy and detailed application to the National Register, and our application then underwent a rigorous evaluation process. This
honor will aid our foundation in its work of preserving the Listening Point property as well as Sigurd Olson’s legacy of wilderness education.”

Sigurd Olson (1899-1982) was a nationally recognized wilderness advocate who actively promoted wilderness conservation with national organizations like the Izaak Walton League, National Parks Association, and the Wilderness Society. Though he worked on wilderness issues across the country, he worked for many decades to protect his beloved Quetico-Superior region, the international area that includes the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Quetico Provincial Park, and Voyageurs  National Park.

Olson also became one of the nation’s most loved wilderness authors. His evocative writing captured the canoe country in nine books like The Singing Wilderness (1956), Listening Point (1958), and Reflections from the North Country (1976). Sigurd Olson created Listening Point in
1956 as a private retreat. It became widely known and celebrated after Alfred Knopf published Olson’s book of the same name two years later.

The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of historic properties recognized by the federal government as worthy of preservation for their significance in American history, architecture, archaeology, engineering, and culture. The National Register was created in 1966 and is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect our significant historic places under the provisions of the National Historic Preservation Act.

The Listening Point Foundation, Inc., a nonprofit charitable organization, was established in 1998 and is dedicated to furthering Sigurd Olson’s legacy of wilderness education, and preserving Listening Point, the rugged northern Minnesota lakeshore property. The Listening Point  Foundation owns and cares for Listening Point, conducts visits for the interested public, publishes wilderness education materials, and sponsors
wilderness educational programs.

The post Listening Point Named to National Historic Registry in 2007 appeared first on Listening Point Foundation.

I’m sure we all wonder how Sig would respond to a major event like the Pagami Creek forest fire.

Back in the 1970s, Bud Heinselman was finishing up on his monumental fire history research in the BWCAW. He and Sig collaborated often then because of the upcomign 1978 legislation. Bud, undoubtedly, would not pass up an opportunity to discuss his work as well as the political questions.

So, Sig was well aware of the dominant influence of fire in boreal forests. Bud’s work determined that fire would visit on the average of once in every 100 years. In 1863-64, fire covered about half of the Boundary Waters or about 500,000 acres. The Pagami Fire is a little over 90,000 acres as I write this today. Many other fires since the 1600s were larger than Pagami.

One of the great tenets of the wilderness concept is that nature will be able to function as closely to a natural setting as possible. Wildfire is an unruly and unpredictable part of this equation. The esthetics of a burned forest to the untrained eye do not compare to the virgin old growth forest we often associate with wilderness. Bud Heinselman, however, taught us that the forest MUST burn in order to regenerate itself. Natural fire is a little like predation in that it is not pretty at the time, but it is necessary for a healthy system.

So, I think Sig would be very comfortable with whatever outcome the Pagami fire gives us. No lives were lost, no private structures were lost, only two major canoe routes are significantly affected, the moose are especially pleased, next May the forest floor will be green again, a whole host of plant life will have a new beginning. These are all good things.

We should all be thankful that Forest Service policy has room for major unpredictable events like this. A healthy vibrant ecosystem requires it.

Chuck Wick
Fall 2011 Listening Point Newsletter 

The post What Would Sig Say About the Pagami Creek Fire? appeared first on Listening Point Foundation.

Researchers from the University of Minnesota’s Center for Dendrochronology are using tree-rings to help better understand the last three centuries of wildfire in the Superior National Forest’s (SNF) Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW). The BWCAW is an exceptional example of a fire-adapted ecosystem. No disturbance has played a more integral role in determining the composition, structure, and distribution of vegetation across the BWCAW’s terrestrial landscape than fire. After nearly a century of largely successful fire exclusion, SNF wilderness administrators are seeking greater knowledge on how to best manage and propagate fire within the Boundary Waters wilderness.

Much of our current understanding of fire in the Boundary Waters can be attributed to the research efforts of ecologist and wilderness advocate Miron ‘Bud’ Heinselman. Eighteen years ago, the Listening Point Foundation’s Vice Chair, Charles Wick, thoughtfully preserved a dozen firescarred red pine samples Bud Heinselman collected in the 1970s. The samples are on loan to graduate student Lane Johnson with the U of M’s Department of Geography for dendrochronological analysis. The project is part of a larger, historic assessment of human, fire, and climate relationships within the western Boundary Waters.

For more information on the project, please contact Lane Johnson, Center for  Dendrochronology, University of Minnesota; www.umndendro.umn.edu

The post Tree Rings Tell BWCA Story appeared first on Listening Point Foundation.