Bernie Tanski and Cliff Eng drove through the dense conifer forests of northeastern Minnesota this week to check if their cabin had survived the flames.
The two friends have been fishing and deer hunting for decades in the lake-rich wilderness roughly 50 miles north of where they live in Duluth. But the rural vacation home they own together was threatened for days by major wildfires that exploded in size amid unusually warm and dry conditions. Eventually the fires subsided enough for the two men to briefly visit the home and see that it was OK.
“We’ve seen lots of little fires but nothing like this,” said Mr. Tanski, 80, a retired schoolteacher. The possibility that a fire could become so large, Mr. Eng, 84, said, “wasn’t on our radar.”
Three fast-growing wildfires that erupted this week in rural northern Minnesota have consumed more than 32,000 acres and destroyed an estimated 150 structures, serving as a kind of wake-up call for residents who often see their state as spared from the very worst of disasters fueled by climate change.
In recent years, residents of California, Colorado and New Mexico seeking refuge from heat waves and wildfires have been moving to “climate-proof Duluth.” The effects of climate change in the Midwest have perhaps seemed less terrifying than elsewhere; Minnesota’s bone-chilling winters, for example, have recently transformed into unseasonably pleasant, even snowless affairs.
But these latest wildfires underscore that the warming climate is also making disasters more likely in Minnesota as wildfire season — a fact of life in the state — is becoming longer and more severe, experts say. The same trend has begun to emerge in several other states not known for their fires, including Wisconsin, Georgia and the Carolinas.
In Minnesota, a typical year brings an average of 1,200 wildfires that burn through 12,600 acres, according to state data. Since the beginning of this year, more than 1,000 wildfires have already destroyed more than 50,000 acres.
“We are trending toward hotter, drier weather, and that is going to change the fire situation,” Sarah Strommen, head of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, told journalists this week. “It is hard to compare what has been historically the normal fire season pattern in the state of Minnesota and what we’re seeing now and going forward.”
The three fires erupted on Sunday and Monday in a sparsely populated part of the Arrowhead region of Minnesota, about 50 miles west of Lake Superior and roughly the same distance south of the picturesque Boundary Waters approaching Canada.
The fires burned rapidly until rainstorms arrived on Thursday night, which allowed firefighters to reach 25 percent containment on the Munger Shaw fire, the smallest of the three. Officials lifted evacuation orders in the immediate area on Friday.
While the rain helped firefighters, the larger two blazes — the Camp House and Jenkins Creek fires — remained uncontained on Friday evening and residents have not yet been allowed to return to their homes. On Friday, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota met with firefighters and toured the destruction as it rained over the burn zones. He stressed that the rain would not be a silver bullet.
“This is going to be a fight over the coming days and potentially weeks as these fires are brought under control,” Mr. Walz told reporters.
The fires tore through stands of pine and spruce trees and left behind charred trunks and blackened ground. At the plot of one home, a brick chimney was the only thing standing. At another, a mailbox with an American flag remained, while the house itself had been reduced to rubble.
A mile south in Brimson, Hugo’s Bar has stayed open around the clock to serve as a hub for displaced residents and emergency workers to get a cup of coffee, use the restroom and pick up snacks and toiletries donated by community members. Neighbors compared forecasts and talked about the rain.
“It’s been an emotional roller coaster,” said Wanda Grew-Jasken, 56, who had evacuated from her home in Brimson and was having a beer at Hugo’s. “All of these friends losing their places. It’s just nuts. Families that have been here over 100 years, and everything is gone.”
The enormous boreal forests that extend across Canada and into northern Minnesota are designed to burn, scientists say. The second deadliest fire in U.S. history was in 1918 in this very part of Minnesota, and is believed to have killed more than 1,000 people.
The region’s fire season has two peaks, one in mid-May and another, larger one in August and September, said Lee Frelich, director of the University of Minnesota Center for Forest Ecology. But the spring season has been growing longer as temperatures rise and snow melts earlier in the year, he said.
“It’s something that’s actually normal in the boreal forest to have big high-intensity fires, but they are becoming more frequent in a warming climate, and this spring season seems to be getting more intense,” said Mr. Frelich, who has been studying these forests for 30 years.
Destructive spring fire seasons are likely to become even more frequent going forward, he said. Climate change is also making severe thunderstorms in these forests more common, knocking down branches and trees that then become fuel for fires to grow even bigger, he added.
The fires that erupted this week did so amid unseasonably high temperatures — pushing 90 degrees and breaking records in some places — and relative humidity levels that were as low as the single digits, said William Glesener, wildfire administration supervisor for the state’s Department of Natural Resources. He said that as many as 30 new fires were erupting every day this week as the typically humid state suffered under the unusual weather pattern for days. It also brought winds up to 40 miles per hour that made the fires difficult to fight.
“We had winds and temperatures that are more representative of the desert southwest than Minnesota,” he said. “It’s a pretty unprecedented situation for us in Minnesota.”
Last year, Jake Hall, 36, and his family moved to northeastern Minnesota from Iowa after he retired from the Army. As he waited at Hugo’s Bar for news about his home, Mr. Hall said he had thought that chilly Minnesota would provide something of a refuge from extreme heat caused by global warming.
He had done some research before moving, and he understood that even up north it would be warmer. He also knew there was a risk of fires in the region. But the severity has surprised him.
“I didn’t think it would burn this soon,” he said.
Soumya Karlamangla is a Times reporter who covers California. She is based in the Bay Area.
David Guttenfelder is a Times visual journalist based in Minneapolis.
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