First Came the DOGE Cuts, Then Came the Wildfires

Conservation Climate & Environment A former wildland firefighter and retired U.S. Forest Service district ranger in the heart of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness explains how federal reductions sidetracked prescribed burns in the Superior National Forest Published Jul 29, 2026 2:00 PM EDT Photo by George Peters / Getty Images Sign up for the Outdoor Life Newsletter Get the hottest outdoor news from Outdoor Life. Northern Minnesota has been ravaged by wildfire this summer. For weeks, these fires have burned through areas of the Superior National Forest and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, even forcing the Forest Service to close and evacuate the popular canoeing and camping area. While wildfires in this part of the Northwoods are not uncommon, this year’s fires were more extreme than usual. They led to prolonged and hazardous air quality issues that drifted south and impacted much of the country. What’s frustrating for a lot of folks inside the Forest Service is that just before this wildfire season, their agency faced some brutal cuts by DOGE under the Trump administration. In many cases, the very folks who were needed to battle these wildfires were let go or forced to resign. On top of that, grant money for important forest management projects was delayed. So on this episode of the Outdoor Life Podcast, I’m talking with Aaron Kania. He’s a former wildland firefighter and a retired U.S. Forest Service district ranger for this area of Minnesota. And he and his Forest Service colleagues had been working for years on a plan to implement prescribed burns that would reduce wildfire risk and improve forest health in this part of Superior National Forest. But then DOGE came calling. Listen to this episode of the Outdoor Life Podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full Interview Transcript Outdoor Life: All right, Aaron, thanks for joining the Outdoor Life Podcast, man. Where are you? Aaron Kania: I’m actually out on Lake Vermilion. We live in a rural area and I have better cell reception out on the lake than I do at the house. So a little easier to connect with you here. Outdoor Life: Nice. Yeah. Okay. So for folks who can’t see what I’m seeing, Aaron is in the back of a canoe. He’s got his life jacket on and he’s just easily paddling across Lake Vermilion. Aaron Kania: It’s a beautiful day out here. Outdoor Life: Yeah, it looks calm out there. Aaron Kania: It is. It’s a little smoky. Honestly, it was foggy this morning and it’s smoky now. But conditions are good. I mean, these are honestly the best conditions for the firefighters. We have a lot of fires outside of the Ely area and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness right now. So these conditions are the moderate conditions that we need for firefighters to be effective. It’s actually the reason I’m able to canoe today is because the firefighters are making so much progress up there, and I feel a little more comfortable with how things are going. Outdoor Life: Yeah. Well, that’s a great segue, because it’s exactly what I wanted to talk to you about. We’ve, and everybody else has, kind of covered these big fires and the subsequent temporary closure of the Boundary Waters. But I think to just get a much better understanding of what’s going on up there and potentially why, you were like the perfect person to talk to. So to kick this thing off, would you just talk about your background, kind of starting as the National Forest Service district manager? Talk about the area that you managed and what your responsibilities were. Aaron Kania: Yeah, absolutely. I feel I was the luckiest guy ever. An absolute dream job. I was the Kawishiwi district ranger with the U.S. Forest Service. And the Kawishiwi District is based out of Ely, Minnesota, which is a beautiful, quaint little town. Very much focused on the tourist. It’s known as the canoe capital of the world. And the Kawishiwi District is really the heart of the Superior National Forest. It’s the middle of the Boundary Waters. And the Boundary Waters is the most visited wilderness. And the Kawishiwi District is the busiest district, and we have the busiest entry points. Now retired, Kania served as the Kawishiwi district ranger with the U.S. Forest Service. Photo courtesy Aaron Kania So I just love wilderness. I love the outdoors, hunting, fishing. And this is really my dream job to finish up my career. So I was there starting in 2020 during COVID, and then ended in a retirement that I had planned well in advance, December 31st of 2025. Outdoor Life: Gotcha. And what were you doing in that window? What were your kind of day-to-day responsibilities? What kind of stuff were you working on? Aaron Kania: Oh, it was cool. No two days were ever the same. I was responsible for being a wilderness steward, so a lot of decisions around the wilderness. Also wildfire management, and a long history with wildfire and incident management teams. There’s stuff outside of the wilderness like logging and timber sales, ATV trails, and even mining. And so the Kawishiwi District is known because of the proximity of copper-nickel mine proposals to the wilderness. So a lot of work related to that. I started here under the first Trump administration and then was here for the Biden administration, and then the second Trump administration. So there’s a lot of pendulum swinging back and forth around the mining issue. But then we also have the seaplane base. So we have three beaver float planes based out of Ely. We have an airport and there’s a helitack base out there with the helicopters, and then an air tanker base at the same place. So when we have fire season, we have a lot of aircraft parked at the airport ready to go. We have fire crews, fire engines. And yeah, just really a lot of stuff. There’s about 80 to 90 employees of the U.S. Forest Service based out of Ely. It’s one of the biggest employers in Ely. And then so much of our economy is dependent on natural resources associated with the national forest. Outdoor Life: Yeah. You and I had met maybe a little less than a year ago, I think. And at the time you were telling me about this really expansive prescribed burn project that you and others in the district had been working on. And you were like really excited about this project. Aaron Kania: Yeah. Outdoor Life: So can you, for the listeners, explain what that project was and is, and kind of why that was so important to you? Aaron Kania: Sure. Yeah. It’s called the Fernberg Corridor Project. And I actually extended my retirement date out 11 months in order to get that at least close enough to the finish line. And what that is, is on the Superior, we’re very strategic about where we do work. We take a look at the maps, see where the highest risk is. Risk is the probability of something occurring and what happens if that thing occurs. So in the Fernberg corridor, it was prime for a large wildfire to happen. And then there’s a lot of homes and businesses, cabins, resorts, camps. Like there’s a Boy Scout camp out there, a Girl Scout camp. So it was really the highest risk on the forest. And that’s where we focused our energy around planning. A resort owner used tow boats to evacuate Boy Scout Troop 78 of Boulder, Colorado from the BWCA. Photo by Anthony Soufflé / The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images And that planning started with a blank map. And I think this is what was really exciting: this is the first time we had really robust consultation with the Ojibwe tribe. They have treaty rights here through the Treaty of 1854 to hunt, fish and gather off of the reservation. So it’s kind of unique, if you think in a national perspective. And so we started with a blank map and we really met with the tribe and said, what do you think? How can we best honor your treaty rights? And their response was, think like fire. Like, you have all these imaginary lines on the map that don’t exist on the land. And if fire were to be there, where does fire want to be? It’s not gonna stop at the wilderness boundary. It’s not gonna stop at the break between Forest Service land and Minnesota Department of Natural Resources land, right? It’s gonna move across that landscape until it gets to a lake or a river. And that’s where it’ll stop. And so that’s where we started this project, the blank map. And then, with the tribe, they started drawing lines on the map and said, fire could potentially travel all the way out here. And then when you turned all the layers back on, well, there’s a big wilderness boundary across that line. And so we did the hard work — this is honoring the tribes — to do the outreach with the environmental groups that are also very motivated to steward these wilderness. They’re wilderness protectors. And so we wanna honor that relationship too, in the Wilderness Act and the rules and laws around the Wilderness Act. So that’s what we did. And it did take us four years, but that was the work we needed to do to make sure it was transparent. It was public and there was a lot of comments. And we incorporated those comments and concerns into the work we were doing. So yeah, that did get signed in May of 2026. There was a government shutdown in there, so we weren’t able to finish it before I retired, but it got signed soon after. Outdoor Life: Yeah. We’ll get into that part in a second. But just to back up a little bit, to be clear here, you were gonna do prescribed fire in the wilderness, right? That’s part of this plan, which would’ve been kind of a unique thing, right? Aaron Kania: Yeah. It’s fairly rare when you look across the whole of the Forest Service. There are forests that are doing prescribed burns. The Bob Marshall’s one of them, or at least manage use of fire. And we’ve done that here on the Superior. This is very much a fire-dependent ecosystem. There’s natural ignitions like from lightning, but historically there was also quite a bit of fire that was started through cultural burning practices