My 5 minutes concerns the Border to Border (B2B) route that would traverse our area as part of a larger project uniting existing roadways and marketing specific routes of increased road usage throughout the state.
Margy Nelson
You are all quite familiar, by now, with this proposal.
I would like to talk about it from the vantage point of tourism and local appreciation for what we have here.
This last Saturday I drove up the Trail, to my cabin on Clearwater Lake, to close down the plumbing for the winter months, bag up the linens, pack up the “freezables” and take them back to town, and update the list of repairs, projects, and dreams we didn’t quite get to this year, be it picking more berries for jam, putting a new roof on the shed, or getting out to this or that lake we haven’t been to for a while.
One of the constants of living in the Superior National Forest, or visiting the BWCAW, is that you can pretty much count on things to be the same from year to year, not everything, of course, but still. When we go back into the woods, we recognize our favorite spots. What we have, what we visit feels familiar, like home, and we all love that, in our own way.
It’s what we come back for.
There is a category of sports activities called “Silent Sports.” That description includes hikers, bikers, walkers, runners, berry pickers, canoeists and kayakers, swimmers, tree climbers, back country hunters, trappers, and fishermen and fisherwomen, and also gatherers of wild rice, mushrooms, herbs and healing plants.
All these activities happen out in nature. Even a family picnic, an outing with friends, open-air concerts, all connect us with “place” and belonging. As locals, and as visitors …. as tourists.
All these people bring money into our community.
The issue here, of course, is in the “silent” part of all these Silent Sport activities. Many places in our state, in our country, do not have the vast and rich quality of nature that we do here. This immersion in nature, “Nature Bathing” as some call it, produces quantifiable health benefits. A motorized vehicle, of any sort, totally changes the atmosphere, the air quality, road activity, noise level, and sense of solitude. Most people come here to get away from all that, to enjoy the peace and quiet that is often so missing where they live.
The marketing alone of increased motorized activity adjacent to the BWCA runs the risk of detracting and negatively impacting what are deemed “priority recreational uses” already here.
We are, all of us, selling nature, and we can’t sell it if we no longer have it.
Access to wilderness will only diminish on this planet. What we still have grows more valuable day by day.
I believe we have a duty to safeguard what we have, at every chance we get. “Choosing not to support this proposal does not take anything away from what is currently possible.”
Each area has its benefits, its uniqueness. There are plenty of other regions better suited to welcome a more motorized tourism. It doesn’t make sense to move backwards on this precious resource!
My family owned Clearwater Lodge and Outfitters from 1963 to 1984, at which point I took over until 1995. My football coach father, Jocko Nelson, and his Aquatennial queen bride, were initially against the removal of motorized boats in parts of the Superior National Forest. Surprised by the rapidly growing customers as the area became more of a wilderness, they grew to understand the value in preserving what was there.
And when the time came to eliminate motor use on BWCA lakes, I can still remember a bunch of football players coming up and helping my dad haul out of the woods quite a few hidden boats stashed on the far end of portages!
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