GRAND MARAIS — Jim Morrison has been living on Poplar Lake long enough to navigate most of the Boundary Waters without a map. As fire chief of the Gunflint Trail Volunteer Fire Department for the past 13 years, he’s done it in the dark, in the rain, through mosquito swarms and lightning, hauling injured campers across muddy portages in the middle of the night.
“There’s no quick way in the wilderness, usually,” Morrison said during a recent conversation with Chris Knopf, executive director of Friends of the Boundary Waters. “Unless the planes are already in the air.”
That conversation offered a rare window into what it actually takes to get someone out of the BWCAW alive. The Gunflint Trail Volunteer Fire Department responded to 57 incidents last year, and the vast majority of them had nothing to do with fire. The department runs a full ambulance service, and in a wilderness corridor that draws thousands of paddlers each summer, emergency medical calls dominate the workload.
“The bulk of our business is EMS calls,” Morrison said. “We had seven or eight fires in 2024. Last year, four.”
The department’s 40 volunteer members include 14 certified EMTs, along with wildland and structure firefighters. In the winter, the trail’s permanent population drops to a few hundred people. In the summer, it can swell to four or five thousand, not counting everyone already inside the wilderness.

The mechanics of a rescue
When a 911 call comes in from the Boundary Waters, it routes to the Cook County Law Enforcement Center in Grand Marais, where dispatchers page the department with whatever information they have. From there, the coordination begins in earnest.
For wilderness calls, Morrison said his first move is typically to contact the U.S. Forest Service for permission to use a motorized vessel to reach the first portage. From there, his crews launch canoes.
The department keeps Kevlar canoes, including several 21-foot three-person models, staged at each of its three fire halls. When those aren’t enough, outfitters along the trail lend their own boats and canoes. Morrison said getting watercraft is rarely the problem. The challenge is speed.
The Forest Service’s Beaver float planes, stationed near Ely, are often the fastest solution.
“If it’s good flying conditions, we’ll almost immediately ask for a Beaver,” Morrison said. With a pilot and plane available, a rescue that might take an hour and a half by canoe can take three minutes by air.
He recalled one incident on Tuscarora Lake where a young woman had suffered a severe concussion and couldn’t walk. The Beaver diverted from a nearby wildfire operation, picked Morrison up at Gunflint Lake’s dock, and had him at her campsite in minutes.
“The pilot and I were able to get her in the plane and get her out, back to the dock, within five minutes of me getting there,” he said.
For ground evacuations, the department uses a wheeled field cart with a large bicycle wheel to carry patients across portages. Four people can manage it safely once a patient is loaded. Morrison’s preference is four canoes with three paddlers each for wilderness extractions, though he said getting that many people isn’t always possible.

A lot of moving parts
Some rescues require orchestrating multiple resources simultaneously. Morrison described a recent call on Saganaga Lake that required three boats in the water, an advanced life support ambulance moving up the trail, and a medical helicopter inbound from the regional air network.
“I’m coordinating with dispatch for a helicopter and for an ALS ambulance and for any other kinds of things we might need,” he said, “and that can all be happening while I’m still driving to the lake.”
ALS, or advanced life support, means a paramedic is on board. The Gunflint department operates at the basic life support level, so timing a rendezvous with an ALS crew from Grand Marais can make a meaningful clinical difference by the time a patient reaches the ambulance. In one case Morrison described, the ability to start an IV immediately on extraction was critical.
The dispatch center in Grand Marais has worked with the department long enough to anticipate some of those needs.
“Sometimes they ask me if I want a helicopter before I even ask,” he said.

A volunteer
operation
Running the organization costs roughly $100,000 a year, Morrison said, with county property tax revenue covering about half. The rest comes from private donations, many from people who live or vacation on the trail, and some from those who have directly benefited from the department’s services.
Capital costs are a persistent challenge. The department’s last ambulance purchase ran $300,000 fully outfitted. New Type 1 fire trucks now run $350,000 to $500,000. Even smaller equipment adds up. Wildland fire gear runs $200 per shirt and pants, $500 to $700 for boots, and a single high-angle rescue harness kit costs around $1,000.
The department shares two specially equipped rescue vehicles with the Cook County Sheriff’s Office under a long-standing cooperative agreement, which helps offset some of those costs.

Skills and turnover
The department turns over roughly 40 percent of its membership each year, Morrison said, due to aging, moves, and changing life circumstances. That means ongoing recruitment and training are constant realities.
New members are required to live on the trail year-round. Summer cabin owners, however eager, don’t get the repetition needed to learn how the department operates under pressure.
“It’s hard to operate doing something that can get kind of messy with people you don’t know,” Morrison said.
He acknowledged that wilderness rescues call on skills many members develop simply by living on the trail. Most have spent years paddling the same lakes they’re now navigating at night in the rain. Several work for outfitters and know individual portages better than he does.
Morrison said he’s noticed something changing in the visitors the department encounters. Cellphone coverage has improved communication significantly, but he worries that reliance on GPS has eroded fundamental navigation skills. He’s seen paddlers who didn’t know where they were because they were behind an island.
“I find that people are coming into the wilderness with fewer skills,” he said. “Their ability to navigate, because they’re so dependent on GPS systems, is not as good as it could be.”
His other persistent concern is simpler: life jackets.
“I see people in pretty windy conditions without a life jacket,” he said.