In February 2023, Wilderness Watch filed a second round of litigation challenging unlawful and excessive commercial, motorized towboat use in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) in northeastern Minnesota. 

 

Spanning 1.1 million acres, the Boundary Waters is the largest Wilderness east of the Rockies and north of the Everglades. With its 1,000-plus pristine lakes and 1,200 miles of rivers and streams, the BWCAW is unique as our nation’s only canoe-country wilderness, where backcountry paddlers can experience these natural waterways and forests in the same way we have for centuries, without motors and other environmentally damaging industrialization.

 

The BWCAW is the most visited Wilderness in the entire National Wilderness Preservation System.

 

The BWCAW was designated as one of the original Wildernesses in the 1964 Wilderness Act. In its first legislation, Congress allowed “established” uses of motorboats to “continue” in the area, but this type of exception proved unworkable as excessive motorboat traffic degraded the Wilderness. In 1978, Congress repealed this special provision and enacted a new law to curtail motorboats in the BWCAW.

 

Political pressure prevented Congress from fully outlawing motorboats in the Boundary Waters, but the new law did place strict limits on their number and locations. The 1978 Act prohibited all motorboat use within the Wilderness except on a few specifically named lakes, instituted phase-outs of motorized use on other lakes, and imposed motor size restrictions. On lakes where motorboat use was allowed, Congress set a statutory cap at “the average actual annual motorboat use of the calendar years 1976, 1977, and 1978 for each lake,” and the Forest Service (FS) calculated and allocated that cap through a series of entry point quotas for each lake. What followed was decades of confused and inconsistent statutory application, an indecipherable hodgepodge of management policies and practices, multiple rounds of litigation, and an increase in particular types of motorized use to the detriment of the Wilderness. Commercial towboat use is a prime example. 

 

Today, roughly one-fifth of the water surface area within the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is subjected to the persistent back and forth buzzing of motorboats including, on some routes, commercial towboats carting paying clients and their canoes to campsites and remote drop-off locations within the Wilderness. This has turned many entry-points and travel routes into busy motorways. The popular entry point of Moose Lake, where commercial towboat use is particularly excessive, is known for its motorized bottlenecks and the whine of engines. During one trip to survey the Moose Lake entry-point, Wilderness Watch staff were told by an outfitter that Wilderness visitors who would not otherwise consider a motorized tow regularly take a tow because paddling through motorized use areas is so unpleasant.

 

In 2015, Wilderness Watch filed a lawsuit in federal district court to force the FS to comply with its own plans and regulations limiting commercial towboat use in the BWCAW. Wilderness Watch had discovered that the FS wasn’t controlling the number of towboat trips, and its system for monitoring them was deeply flawed, relying upon reports submitted by the outfitters after the season was finished. These after-the-fact reports provided no way for the FS to track the number of towboat trips during the season or to end towboat trips when the maximum limit had been reached. As a result, many years since 1993 witnessed significant violations of the towboat limit, with the FS doing nothing to correct this problem, until Wilderness Watch’s successful lawsuit forced them to finally confront this issue.

 

To settle our 2015 lawsuit, the FS promised to assess the towboat numbers and apply the legal standards for whether and to what extent they could be allowed. But now, several years later, the agency has failed to uphold its promises, dragging its feet and repeatedly punting its work on the towboat problem, which has only grown worse in the meantime.

 

We’re taking the agency back to court because we can’t sit by while the unlawful wilderness degradation worsens year after year and the Forest Service continues to kick the can down the road. In the past, the Forest Service has repeatedly shaped its management decisions around refusing to limit ongoing towboat activity, even when that activity persistently increases. Because the agency has shown itself unwilling to meaningfully address the problem and comply with its legal obligations, we’ll be asking the federal court in Minnesota to enforce the law and hold the Forest Service accountable for protecting the Boundary Waters’ precious wilderness.

 

• Read our Complaint (2023)
• Read our blog "What's all the Buzz in the Boundary Waters"

 

Background:
The 1964 Wilderness Act generally prohibits commercial services in designated Wildernesses, except for a few limited activities like outfitters and guides. The BWCAW is also governed by the 1978 BWCAW Act (P.L. 95-495), which required the FS to implement motorboat use quotas that did not exceed the average actual annual motorboat use in the calendar years 1976, 1977, and 1978.

The Forest Service’s 1993 BWCAW Management Plan established an overall motorboat cap of 10,539 motorboat trips for the entire Wilderness, based on the 1976-78 average use. It limited commercial towboats to their 1992 levels, which the agency later calculated was 1,342 towboat trips per year. Litigation by environmental organizations challenged some aspects of the 1993 plan, including the FS’s proposal to remove towboats from the overall motorboat quota, place all towboat operators under Special Use Permits (SUPs), and cap towboat use at 1992 levels. During the litigation, the agency calculated 1992 use levels and told the court that it would cap the towboat use at 1,342 towboat trips per year.

But since that time, the FS has turned a blind eye to the commercial towboat use and allowed it to grow. Several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and subsequent analysis showed that the FS has allowed use to significantly grow to several times that cap (e.g., 3,879 “boat days” of towboat use—not trips, which would be a higher number—in 2000, 4,555 “boat days” from just one district in 2003, etc.). In 2014, for example, the FS authorized 2,124 commercial towboat trips, but 2,614 towboat trips were actually reported. And these figures come from substantially incomplete report forms.

• Read our Comments on the FS's Draft Recreational Commercial Services Needs Assessment.
• Read our 2015 Complaint.
• Read our Opening Brief (2016)

 

• Other Boundary Waters issues Wilderness Watch is working on:  Good News for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness

Photo: David Grant via Flickr.