The Nature Conservancy purchased more than 12,000 acres of forest, rivers and wetlands between Two Harbors and Ely in northeast Minnesota that the conservation organization plans to restore and make accessible to the public.
The land features more than eight miles of shoreline, including part of the headwaters of the Rainy River watershed, which flows northwest into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and Voyageurs National Park, and the St. Louis River, which drains into Lake Superior.
It also includes several thousand acres that were burned in the Greenwood Fire near Isabella, Minn., in 2021. The nonprofit has already planted hundreds of thousands of trees in the burn area, and plans to plant many more, including trees that are expected to fare well in a warmer climate.
“It’s so much more than a land deal,” said Ann Mulholland, director of The Nature Conservancy in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota.
“We will restore and manage this forest to maximize its health, wildlife habitat, demonstrate climate smart forestry practices, and we’ll use forest restoration techniques to reduce fire risk, which is really important across the entire property to make it more resilient to climate change,” she said.
The acreage also includes important lowland conifer forest, Mulholland said, with significant peatlands: spongy forests that store immense amounts of carbon in their saturated soils.
Peatlands cover only about three percent of the earth’s surface (nearly 10 percent of Minnesota’s acreage), but they store about 30 percent of the earth’s soil carbon.
“So it is real important that we play our play our part in protecting those peatlands that are left and thinking about restoring those that have been degraded,” Mulholland said.
The newly conserved land will be added to The Nature Conservancy’s adjacent 6,300-acre Sand Lake/Seven Beavers Preserve, nearly tripling its size.
It helps connect a mosaic of more than 40,000 acres of nearby public land in the Superior National Forest, Finland State Forest and the Sand Lake Peatland Scientific and Natural Area.
The Nature Conservancy isn’t disclosing the purchase price, nor saying who it bought the land from, only that they purchased it from a private, non-local LLC.
It’s the nonprofit’s largest forest acquisition in Minnesota in a quarter century, and it’s the latest in a string of high-profile recreational land purchases in northern Minnesota.
In March, a former resort used by 3M employees for many years on Mantrap Lake in Hubbard County was acquired by the Minnesota Land Trust and Northern Waters Land Trust, and then transferred to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, which plans to operate it as a wildlife management area.
More than 8,000 acres of timberlands formerly owned by PotlatchDeltic and subsequently purchased by The Conservation Fund were also transferred to nine counties across northern Minnesota. That included more than 4,000 acres that St. Louis County acquired in August, about 120 miles north of Duluth.
The Nature Conservancy land will remain open to the public, the group said, though visitors should know there are no developed trails or restrooms on the property.
“It’ll be for those that are seeking out wildlife and seeking out recreation that are a little bit more rugged,” Mulholland said.
