The 2026 Wildfires of Canoe Country

Canoe country in both Canada and the United States is on fire with major fires burning in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Quetico Provincial Park, and Wabakimi Provincial Park. Together, these three areas cover over 4,460,000 acres of land and lakes devoted to canoeing, and the current wildfires are burning over 1,000,000 acres between the three. The biggest is in Wabakimi and the smallest in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. It’s hard to get a grip on the massive scale of these fires, and the complicated maps online weren’t helping me to visualize them. So, I fired up QGIS and made my own map.

The goal of the map was to remove the complicated overlays, road systems, most of the small towns, evacuation zones, and anything else that complicated the map. I wanted to see the fire perimeters and the public land boundaries. I also wanted to see the larger lakes in the area.

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Because not all government sources were showing all the fires or showing them correctly, I wanted to find authoritative fire perimeters. For example, Ontario’s interactive fire map wasn’t showing all the fires in Quetico. I ended up using a national data source from each country that automatically updates when I open the map in QGIS. I used a data source from the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System from Natural Resources Canada for Canadian data, and for the US data, I used the Wildland Fire Interagency Geospatial Services from the National Interagency Fire Center.

After I gathered the data sources, I needed to make a decision about colors and styling. I live near the Boundary Waters, and ash was falling from the sky the other day. That was on my mind, so I decided to use the colors of ash for the land, the parks and the wilderness area. For the lakes, I wanted a muted blue to match, but also to look like blue seen through smoke. Then I needed a muted red to contrast with the rest of the map, but also blend in.

I then wanted the legend matter to be compact and not distract from the rest of the map. If my map titles related to the map in an obvious way, I like to incorporate the colors of the map symbology. I did that by making the word “Wildfire” that same color as the fires on the map. I also wanted both horizontal and vertical versions, but I personally like the vertical version better. I’m not sold on the inset on the horizontal version.

I’m still not 100% sure that I like the labeling, but I’ll mess around with it a bit.

While I haven’t had time to make this map into a web app, I’m learning the process. If I succeed, I’ll upload it here so that you can interact with it in the way you would any web-based map. For now, here’s the vertical version. You can click the map to see a larger version of it. Depending on the load on my server and your internet connection speed, it make take a bit of time to load. This map was made on July 20, 2026 at 12:30pm CDT. It reflects the state of the fires at that time.

I hope this is helpful for those of you who love canoe country as much as I do.