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Former Onalaska residents Dan and Irene Hellie were among some 500 volunteers who planted pine seedlings along the Gunflint Trail earlier this month in the area affected by the Ham Lake forest fire last May. The fire raged through nearly 120 square miles in and along the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Minnesota.

We heard about the Gunflint Green Up while talking with the Hellies, who now live in Duluth, Minn., about a canoe outing with them we’re planning in July. Dan, who guided canoe trips in the Boundary Waters as a young man, always has a good story to tell and the Green Up provided one more, this one of a Gunflint reunion.

The Hellies have a cabin on the Gunflint. Dan has been coming to the area since he first visited with his parents. Here’s Dan’s Green Up story.

After the pine seedlings were planted, some 50,000 of them, the volunteers were treated to a dinner at the Gunflint Lodge at the end of the Gunflint Trail.

Dan asked a man seated at their picnic table about what connection he had to the Gunflint that caused him to volunteer for the Green Up. The man replied that he had been a fishing guide at the End of the Trail Resort in the 1950s.

Dan said that was most interesting since he and his parents had vacationed at that resort, long since demolished and incorporated into the Boundary Waters territory, during that same time period. Their guide had made a huge impression on Dan, who was 12 at the time, because they caught 70 walleyes during their stay. “I can still remember his name,” Dan said to the man across the table. “His name was Steve.”

The man tugged at his jacket to show the name lettered across the front: Steve.

And some 50 years after he had fished with Steve, Dan said he recalled that the guide, who was 19 at the time, attended Hamline University.

So he had, said Steve, who had come from his home in the Twin Cities to help plant trees.

Dan fell in love with the Boundary Waters and, when still a young man, bought a piece of land on a lake along the Gunflint. Many years later he and Irene built a cabin where they plan to retire.

Dan is a distant cousin of mine and our families were close as we grew up in Albert Lea, Minn. It was a coincidence that brought us together for a time in Onalaska in the 1990s. Dan and Irene’s sons, Chris and Alex, are both Onalaska High School graduates. And both of them are now serving in the Army in Iraq, Alex on his second deployment.

Dan and Irene are looking forward to more Gunflint reunions when Chris comes home on leave this summer and Alex finishes his Army obligation later this year.