The Widjiwagan Forest: Companion for the Next Hundred Years
By John Saxhaug and Tom Burket
Wiijiiwaagan — the Ojibwe word that gives our camp its name — means “a friend, spouse, ally, partner, companion on the path of life.” Ojibwe linguist James Vukelich, in his presentation on the word’s meaning, takes the idea further by saying, “A relative is someone you have a relationship with. And an Anishinaabe knows a human being has a relationship with everyone and everything in the world — that could be stones, water, trees. It could be wind and in fact everything here on earth then, all of a sudden, becomes a relative.”
As we approach Camp Widjiwagan's centennial in 2029, this understanding has quietly reshaped how the community thinks about the roughly 265 acres of forest surrounding the camp. We are not simply managing a resource. We are accompanying a relative through change — and change is coming, whether we're ready or not.
Crisis as Catalyst
The story begins, as many recent stories do, with the pandemic. When Camp Widjiwagan closed during the summer of 2020, property manager Joe Smith saw an opportunity in the silence. Spruce budworm — a native insect whose populations periodically explode — had devastated the balsam fir in and around the camp's developed areas. Dead and dying trees created serious fire risk. With no campers on site, Smith began the slow, necessary work of removal.
That urgent response grew into something larger. Over the following years, staff treated more than 43 acres of roughly the 160 acres of forest land surrounding Widji’s developed areas, opening the forest canopy and reducing fuel loads. The work was hard with wet ground, clouds of mosquitoes, the particular exhaustion of dropping trees in thick brush. But it revealed both the severity of the problem and the possibility of a more comprehensive response.
A Plan Takes Shape
In 2022, the St. Louis County Soil and Water Conservation District provided Camp Widjiwagan with a formal Woodland Stewardship Plan — a 34-page document assessing the property's soils, hydrology, cover types and management options. For most readers, it’s dry technical material. For those who love this forest, this professional guidance is a gift grounded in the specific character of this land.
The plan identified four primary goals: mitigate fire risk, improve forest stand health, encourage regeneration of desirable species and improve wildlife habitat. A Forest Stewardship Advisory Team — volunteers from the Widjiwagan community with decades of forestry experience — adopted the plan and added three more goals: climate adaptation and resilience, biodiversity protection, and trail system development.
That last addition matters. The advisory team recognized that caring for the forest isn’t separate from helping people experience it. Trails bring campers and visitors into a relationship with the woods. The forest isn’t a backdrop for the Widji experience. It is the experience.
The Work Expands
The stewardship plan opened doors. In 2022, Camp Widjiwagan received federal cost-sharing funds called EQIP grants through the Natural Resources Conservation Service. These funds helped the ongoing balsam removal work to expand dramatically. Property Manager Jake Cahill describes the grant as an eight-zone, multi-year project covering approximately 160 acres near camp’s developed areas. Staff have completed two zones and are working ahead of schedule.
Cahill describes the process by saying, “What we’re doing is improving the forest by leaving all the desired trees we want, reducing the risk of fire. This is opening up large areas on camp property that make exploring more enjoyable, helps wildlife and hopefully will help grow blueberries and other plants.” The U.S. Forest Service will eventually conduct prescribed burns in cutover areas, reducing flammable woody material and preparing seedbeds for regeneration.
Another project addressed the red pine stand behind Moose Cabin. Many of these trees are over a century old and predate the camp itself. But age and accumulated damage had left them in decline. Interior rot, carpenter ant infestation and excavation damage from pileated woodpeckers had compromised roughly a third of the stand. Following the stewardship plan’s recommendations, three members of the advisory team inventoried the trees and identified 25 with the greatest risk of falling. The harvest took place in spring 2024.
For anyone who has walked that stand and marveled at its cathedral quiet, the decision to remove trees wasn’t easy. But now the remaining pines have room to thrive, and the next generation of the stand has space to establish.
Many Hands
What strikes anyone who has participated in this work is how many people show up. Reforestation began in spring 2021, when community members started planting seedlings in the cutover areas. Over five years, volunteers have planted more than 1,500 trees across roughly 12 acres: white pine, red pine, bur oak, red oak, swamp white oak, basswood, white cedar, hackberry, mountain ash and other species selected for resilience in a changing climate.
This is not glamorous work and not just because you’re swatting mosquitoes. You also have to trust that a six-inch seedling will someday be a tree your grandchildren will walk beneath. The people who do it — retirees who first came to Widji as campers in the 1960s, parents who want their kids to know this place, professionals who spend their weekdays in offices and their weekends in the woods — aren't doing it for recognition. They’re doing it because the forest is kin, and you show up for kin.
In September 2025, juniors from Open World Learning High School in St. Paul spent three days at Widjiwagan as part of their 11th-grade curriculum. Alongside trail maintenance and camp projects, they learned forest stewardship and helped remove competing balsam and aspen from around young trees and cap buds to protect seedlings from winter browse. For many, it was their first encounter with this kind of work. For the forest, it was another generation entering the relationship.
The Forest of 2129
The Widjiwagan forest of today is not the forest of 1929. When the camp was established, the northwoods was recovering from the great logging era, and the particular mix of species we now consider “natural” was already a landscape in transition. A century from now, climate models suggest, the forest will look different again as more hardwoods as the boreal zone shifts north. There will be new pressures from pests and weather we can’t fully predict.
The stewardship plan addresses this directly. Species selection for replanting emphasizes diversity and climate adaptability. Management decisions consider not only what the forest is, but what it is becoming. The goal isn’t to freeze the woods in amber. It’s to accompany change wisely and be, in Vukelich's terms, a good relative.
Vukelich, in the same presentation, offers a vision of what that relationship looks like in practice: “In a good way we can accompany all our human relatives, our family members, our clan, those in our community, those in our nation. So, we can have a good balanced peaceful relationship with all of them.”
The forest is part of that community now. As we celebrate our first hundred years and look toward our second, we accept the Widjiwagan forest as our relative, our companion, to steward through whatever comes.
John Saxhaug has been one of camp’s dedicated volunteers for more than six decades. A University of Minnesota forestry graduate, he spent his career in conservation and land acquisition with the MNDNR and USFWS.