A hefty backpack slung from his shoulders, hiker Martin Kubik places a hand on a fallen tree blocking his path and groans. “I hate this,” he mutters as he lowers himself beneath the trunk, one knee scraping the ground, to pass under. It is a labored routine he repeats again a few hundred yards farther down the trail at the next fallen tree, and then again at the next one. And again.
Each obstacle on the Powwow Trail in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness brings more protest from Kubik. “This is what they want,” he grunts, as he stands back up. “It will become so overgrown and then they will close it.”
The U.S. Forest Service will stop clearing the trail to allow the forest to recover from a devastating fire five years ago. A few years from now, or maybe 10, it will be easier to remove debris from the trail when the trees recover enough to block sunlight from the forest floor, said Forest Service spokeswoman Kris Reichenbach. She insists there are no plans to permanently close the path.
But the decision to stop maintaining the trail is unnerving to hikers like Kubik, a longtime Minnesota hiking advocate, author of trail guides and president of the hiking organization Friends of BWCA Trails. Kubik and a group of dedicated hikers worry that priorities will change, and fear they are seeing the end of a beloved Boundary Waters backpacking trail, one that was threatened with closure before.
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I am Jeff Clark, founder of Internet Brothers, producer of this blog, and passionate about hiking. I live in Western NC near the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains. Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests are just out my door, so the content will focus on these areas, but let me know what you would like to see on the site. 
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