In the summer of 2014, Thomas Tidwell, who had worked for the U.S. Forest Service for thirty-seven years, the last five of those as its chief, decided to visit the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a mosaic of more than a thousand lakes and rivers on almost 1.1 million acres in northern Minnesota, along the Canadian border. A Chilean company, Antofagasta, had asked to renew two leases on land very near the wilderness area, where the firm intended to mine for copper. The U.S. Forest Service, which was later given the authority to grant or deny the request, would hold hearings and look at scientific data, both about the watershed and the kind of mining proposed. But Tidwell wanted to see the area for himself. That summer, in a Beaver float plane typically used for search and rescue, Tidwell became one of the few people to observe the B.W.C.A.W. from the air. In 1949, President Truman signed an executive order prohibiting all private and commercial aircraft from flying below four thousand feet over the area. Tidwell had grown up in Idaho and spent much of his career in the West; he was familiar with places like the Bob Marshall Wilderness and Utah’s Wasatch-Cache National Forest, but what he saw from the air over the B.W.C.A.W.s left him awestruck. “I couldn’t believe the beauty of the area,” he told me. “And how much water there was. It gave me this sense of wonder—a place where you could get away from everything.”

Two and a half years later, in December of 2016, after an extensive study, the U.S. Forest Service denied the renewal of the leases in a detailed, strongly-worded twenty-eight-page letter to the director of the Bureau of Land Management. “I find unacceptable the inherent potential risk that development of a regionally-untested copper-nickel sulfide ore mine within the same watershed as the B.W.C.A.W. might cause serious and irreplaceable harm to this unique, iconic, and irreplaceable wilderness area,” Tidwell wrote. However, when Donald Trump took office, the next year, his Administration revoked the Forest Service’s authority on the issue, and effectively reversed the decision. Antofagasta has since taken the first major step to mine copper along what may well be one of the nation’s most bewitching landscapes. As Tidwell told me, “There’s no place like it in the country. There are places where mining feels like a realistic option. This is the wrong place.”

I first came to the B.W.C.A.W. in the summer of 1975. I had taken a break from college and had just finished working as a community organizer in Atlanta—an exhilarating experience but also one that left me exhausted and unsure of what lay ahead. I flew to Minneapolis to visit a friend who attended college nearby, and we decided to ride our bikes to Duluth and then up Highway 61 (yes, Bob Dylan’s Highway 61) along the Lake Superior shoreline. From a small shore town, Grand Marais, we headed up the Gunflint Trail, a winding road that was then partly gravel, and which extends fifty-seven miles to the northeast corner of the wilderness area. There we rented an aluminum canoe and Duluth packs, and followed a snaking river into a series of lakes, each of its own shape and character, each more beautiful than the last. I had never experienced such stillness. Indeed, it’s the wondrous paradox of the B.W.C.A.W. that although it’s easily accessible—roughly a hundred and fifty thousand people visit each year—within a day or two of paddling you can go days without seeing another person. There are few vistas from which you can inhale the landscape. Rather, travelling these connected waterways, one feels embedded in the wild, as if curled up on a couch, unaware and unconcerned with what’s happening in the house next door.

I fell in love. Every summer for the past forty-four years, I have headed north—with friends; with children; even, on one occasion, with strangers. Except for a brief period of seven years when I, along with my regular paddling companions, ventured into Canada to run white-water rivers, my destination has been the B.W.C.A.W. I grew up in Manhattan and have spent most of my adult life in Chicago, so I think it’s fair to say I’m a city boy. But I feel most at home on the water, travelling by canoe (now lightweight Kevlar, rather than aluminum). It’s there, in the B.W.C.A.W., that I find solace—where I shed my anxieties and worries; where I can jump from small cliffs into deep, clear waters; where I can eat freshly caught trout; where I can be serenaded by the mournful wails of the loons as they welcome in the night. When I’m not there, I yearn for it. As the naturalist writer Terry Tempest Williams has written, “If you know wilderness in the way you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go.”

I recently spent seven days in the B.W.C.A.W., where my friend and I paddled and portaged hard the first day—the lakes are connected by rough-hewn portages through the woods, some as short as eighty feet, others as long as several miles—so that, for four nights, we had lakes completely to ourselves. The distances to other lakes are long, and the boreal forest is so thick with pine and spruce that, if people were on adjacent bodies of water, we had no way of knowing. The lakes in the B.W.C.A.W. range in size: some are as small as a city block, and at least one is nearly three times the length of Manhattan. Some have been given descriptive monikers: Fat Lake, Slim Lake, Clearwater Lake, Thumb Lake. Others have roots in the Ojibwe language: Ogishkemuncie, Ge-be-on-equat, Saganaga. And still others are more prosaic, presumably named after loggers and trappers and their girlfriends or wives: Lake Eugene, Tin Can Mike, Phoebe, Ima. On this trip, we spent two nights on Finger Lake, a body of water that—as the name suggests—is marked by a series of bays and inlets. We camped on rocks overlooking the water, where we bathed and fished, and stood outside our tents one night to listen to a pack of wolves howling from across the lake, a baying filled both with eeriness and nobility.

People marvel at the quiet there. The naturalist and writer Sigurd Olson, who made his home in Ely, a town of a few thousand along the western end of the B.W.C.A.W., wrote in one of his many essays of a moment “before dawn.” “The lake was breathing softly as in sleep; rising and falling, it seemed to me to absorb like a great sponge all the sounds of the earth,” he wrote. “It was a time of quiet—no wind rustling the leaves, no lapping of the water, no calling of animals or birds. But I listened just the same, straining with all my faculties toward something—I knew not what—trying to catch the meanings that were there in that moment before the lifting of the dark.”

Photograph by Christopher Walker

At night, lying in your tent, even the rustling of leaves takes on outsized proportions. I’ve mistaken a squirrel scurrying outside my tent for a bear. Another time, a bear so stealthily entered our camp that we didn’t notice until it began foraging around and clanging our pots and pans.