CLOQUET — Forest researcher Lane Johnson has a collection of photographs from the early 1900s showing the state’s virgin pine forests.

The forests in the old photos are of massive red pines and white pines with fire-scarred trunks towering over understories of berry bushes and pine seedlings.

Fire, intentionally set by Native Americans for a variety of reasons, was a major influence on the landscape. Today, after more than a century of fire suppression, northern Minnesota’s forests are often dense with hazel and balsam fir, resulting in fewer pine trees and conditions ripe for catastrophic wildfire.

A Duluth resident, Johnson works at the University of Minnesota’s Cloquet Forestry Center, or CFC, which has a mission is to “connect people and ideas to build understanding of northern fore

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