St. Louis County plants 350,000 pines to restore wildfire-burned land

St. Louis County has started putting 350,000 red and white pine seedlings into about 500 acres of wildfire-burned land, one of the first large-scale steps in a recovery that county foresters say will take decades to fully show in the landscape.

The planting targets ground scorched in the 2025 fires, where natural regrowth has been too slow or too weak to restore the forest on its own. County forester Erik Anton said one of the planting sites was once a 55-year-old red pine plantation and, before that, a farm field on a homestead, a reminder of how quickly a single piece of land can shift through generations of use and disturbance. He said getting trees back in the ground now matters because the site has already changed so much and needs direct help to recover.

County officials said the seedlings will go in over the next several days. They also said it usually takes two or three years to line up pine seedlings, but a recent delivery of 23,000 seedlings from Minnesota Power and ALLETE helped move the work ahead faster. That donation fits into Minnesota Power’s broader Rajala Woods effort, which aims to plant up to 3 million white pine, red pine, jack pine and spruce seedlings on company land.

Kurt Anderson, the county’s director of environment and land management, said the goal is not just to replace trees that burned. The work is meant to restore biodiversity, reduce wildfire risk and rebuild habitat across a county that describes itself as the largest east of the Mississippi River. Nate Anderson, the county’s deputy director of Land and Minerals, said the burned areas have lost a lot of fuel, which may lower fire risk compared with before, but the county still sees a need to stabilize the land and bring back a healthier forest structure.

The need for that kind of intervention became clear after the Camp House Fire, Jenkins Creek Fire and Munger Shaw Fire affected more than 32,000 acres across northeastern Minnesota in May 2025. State records later put the Camp House Fire at more than 12,300 acres in St. Louis and Lake counties, while the Jenkins Creek Fire grew beyond 16,600 acres. The damage prompted evacuations, road closures and a State of Emergency in St. Louis County, where the county board also declared a State of Local Emergency and State of Local Disaster on May 19, 2025.

In the years ahead, the pines now going into the ground will define more than the skyline. They will shape timber supplies, wildlife habitat, erosion control, recreation access and how much fire resilience the county can build into the next forest. County officials say it could take about 50 years for the new stand to regain the size and character of the forest that burned.