Chequamegon-Nicolet: Logging, Recovery, and the Forest That Came Back

The combined Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest was created by merging two separate forests in nineteen ninety-eight: the Chequamegon on the west and the Nicolet on the east. Their histories are versions of the same story repeated across the upper Great Lakes. By the eighteen nineties, Wisconsin's pine forests had been logged out so thoroughly that photographs from the period show a landscape of stumps extending to the horizon. The rivers had been used as log drives and were running with sawdust and debris. The soil was eroding. Fires swept the cutover regularly, fed by the slash that logging companies left behind.

The federal government began acquiring the land in the nineteen thirties under Depression-era programs. The Civilian Conservation Corps planted millions of trees across both forests, young men from the cities of the Midwest building the infrastructure that now shelters timber wolves, bald eagles, and brook trout. The forest you move through today is almost entirely second growth, the result of ninety years of regrowth on what had been one of the most completely deforested landscapes on the continent.

The Chequamegon-Nicolet now supports the largest population of timber wolves in the Great Lakes states outside of Minnesota. The wolves range widely across the forest's interior lakes and river corridors, and their recovery from the edge of extirpation across the region in the nineteen seventies is one of the more dramatic wildlife recoveries in the forest's history. The forest also holds a dense concentration of inland lakes, more than eleven hundred named lakes in the Chequamegon unit alone, most of them accessible by forest road or trail and available for fishing, paddling, and camping without a fee.

What you are driving through was rubble a century ago. The forest is the recovery.