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Superior National Forest
IUCN Category VI (Managed Resource Protected Area)
Location	St. Louis, Lake, and Cook counties, Minnesota, USA
Nearest city	Several
Coordinates	47°54′10″N 91°51′12″W / 47.90278, -91.85333Coordinates: 47°54′10″N 91°51′12″W / 47.90278, -91.85333
Area	3,900,000 acres (6,100 mi² or 16,000 km²)
Established	1909
Governing body	U.S. Forest Service

Location of the forest

Superior National Forest, part of the United States National Forest system, is located in the Arrowhead Region of the state of Minnesota between the Canada – United States border and the north shore of Lake Superior. The area is part of the greater Boundary Waters region along the border of Minnesota and the Canadian province of Ontario, a historic and important thoroughfare in the fur trading and exploring days of British North America.

Under the administration of the United States Forest Service, the Superior National Forest comprises over 3,900,000 acres (6,100 mi² or 16,000 km²) of woods and waters. The majority of the forest is multiple-use, including both logging and recreational activities such as camping, boating, and fishing. Slightly over a quarter of the forest however is set aside as a wilderness reserve known as the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA), where canoers can travel along interconnected lakes and rivers and over historic portages once used by the First Nations and later by European explorers and traders.

Location

The National Forest is headquartered in Duluth, which is approximately 150 miles from the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, but the forest actually begins about 50 miles (80 km) north of Duluth. The forest service office at Ely is the most centrally located station within the forest; Ely is about 240 miles (385 km) from the Twin Cities and 110 miles (175 km) from Duluth.

Landforms

The forest covers 3.9 million acres (6,100 mi² or 16,000 km²), and has over 445,000 acres (1,800 km²) of water.^[1] Its waters include some 2000 lakes and rivers,^[2] more than 1,300 miles (2,100 km) of cold water streams, and 950 miles (1,530 km) of warm water streams.^[3] Many of the lakes are located in depressions formed by the diffential erosion of tilted layers of bedded rock; these depressions were given their final form by glacial scouring during recent ice ages.^[4]

This view from Eagle Mountain, the state's highest point, shows features of a peneplain; even in this area of significant local relief, the distant horizon is relatively flat.^[4]

The forest is located on part of the Canadian Shield. The area is on a low plateau which is part of the Superior Upland. High points include the Sawtooth Mountains, a range of hills along the shore of Lake Superior, the Misquah Hills including Eagle Mountain, the state's highest point, and other uplands along the Laurentian Divide separating the watershed of the Great Lakes and Atlantic Ocean from that of Hudson Bay and the Arctic Ocean. Despite the presence of dramatic cliffs and other local differences in elevation, the area is essentially flat, as it is part of an old peneplain eroded by weathering, water, and especially glaciers.

The principal surficial result of recent glaciation is not the deposition of glacial drift (unlike most of the rest of the state), but the remodeling of the landscape by the scraping away of softer surfaces down to bare hard rock. The land therefore is raw, with many outcroppings of ancient bedrock, overlain in places by thin layers of gravelly soil and, in the west, silts deposited by Glacial Lake Agassiz.^[4]

In June 2008, legislation was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives to sell 6,700 acres (27 km²) of land in the forest to a mining company; the company wants the land to mine deposits of "copper, nickel, platinum and palladium".^[5]

Life forms

Flora

The forest contains both true boreal forest (taiga), and a mixed conifer-hardwood forest known as the North Woods, a transition province between the northern boreal forest and deciduous forests to the south.^[6] Conifers include several varieties of pine, fir, and spruce trees, principal deciduous species are mountain ash, maple, aspen, oak, and paper birch are also common.^[7] Characteristic aquatic plants include water lilies and wild rice.

Fauna

Fish species such as walleye, northern pike, smallmouth bass, lake trout, brook trout, rainbow trout, and brown trout can be found in abundance in the forest's waters. Larger wildlife species include white-tailed deer, moose, Canadian Lynx, American black bear, and the gray or timber wolf. Northern Minnesota has the largest population of gray wolves in the lower 48 states, with approximately 300-400 wolves within the boundaries of the Superior National Forest.^[8] Located at the northern edge of the range of the hummingbird and near the southern edge of the range of the Canada Jay, the forest has 163 nesting species of birds, the largest number of any national forest.^[2] Species include the Bald Eagle and other raptors, the ubiquitous common loon, and northern waterfowl.

See also

• List of U.S. national forests
• Chippewa National Forest
• List of Minnesota trees
• List of U.S. Wilderness Areas
• International Boundary Waters Treaty
• The BWCAWiki

References

Cited references

General references

• Website of the Superior National Forest
• History of the Superior National Forest
• A map of The forest

Parts of this article were taken from the Forest Service website. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the text is in the public domain.

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