Superior National Forest

Pete Stauber, the incumbent Republican from Minnesota's 8th Congressional District, introduced House Joint Resolution 140 in January 2026 to overturn a 20 year mining moratorium established by the Biden administration in 2023.

The original ban protected 225,504 acres of the Superior National Forest from mining and geothermal leasing, safeguarding the headwaters of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, which is the BWCAW, from sulfide or copper mining.

The resolution passed the House and the Senate, signed into law by Trump in April, officially lifting the moratorium and allowing mining companies to pursue permits for copper-nickel mining near the BWCAW.

This resolution sets legal precedents that could affect public land and land protections nationwide.

I'm going to do my best to.

talk about this because it's got me shook up a little bit but the basic premise was I got a really good fishing tip from an old pal of ours who worked in the woods and waters of the Boundary Waters and Superior National Forest for his career and he said hey you know I was getting some really nice walleye out on Brule Lake off an island out there and And this tip originally came in, you know, six, seven years ago.

And it was October, you know, here we are in late October.

And I remembered like, oh, yeah, I got that tip about that island.

And then I started, you know, doing research for the University of Minnesota.

I worked for their Natural Resources Research Institute in Duluth, just on various projects, everything from, you know, wetland stuff to, you They've had this thing going since 91 where they're measuring songbird trends in the national forest, mainly the Chippewa National Forest and the Superior National Forest.

So I did that for a lot of years.

And when I...

I've done, and Laura and I have done... just running up north shore on the highway there, following the shore all the way up to Grand Marais and then stay up there and come back or all the way up to the border with Canada.

I will say taking the forestry roads into the Superior National Forest and going along the boundary waters and everything from like Ely to the east is where we did way better.

Oh, yeah.

Missing out on the lake.

It was probably, uh, over half a mile before I could turn around.

Yeah.

I would like to go up and explore more Superior National Forest, but I know a lot of it is like that.

Yeah, you got to look at it.

He was the, their ninth child, the eighth surviving child.

So he grew up following his older brothers through the Superior National Forest, which was created by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1909, learning how to fish, how to hunt, how to traipse through the woods.

Now, this is the Depression.

This is 1936, and the FDR administration had programs to help young people go to college.

Last year, I came across a story that's set differently than most.

It was sent to me by a former park ranger who worked in Superior National Forest in the late 1980s.

He never gave his real name, only going by Lunacy24, and he titled his story simply Never Speak It.

According to Lunacy24, the veteran rangers had an unspoken rule, a word, and a subject they refused to say out loud, and when he finally understood why he wished he'd never asked.

She's 20 now studying environmental science at the University of Minnesota, and last month she asked me about my time with the Forest Service.

I gave her the same answer I've given everyone for the past 36 years.

I worked that one season in Superior National Forest and decided it wasn't for me.

That was a lie.

In 2025 alone, it was used 22 times, including to overturn BLM resource management plans that guided how our public lands were managed.

One specific example, Congress used the CRA to reverse a moratorium on mining in Minneto- Minnesota's Superior National Forest.

You probably saw a lot of us talking about the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and the damages that a mine could take place up there.

That moratorium can never be reinstated by the agency.

Jay Cooke State Park provides a scenic, wooded campground near the Swinging Bridge and River Rapids just outside Duluth.

For free or low-cost camping, the Superior National Forest allows dispersed camping across large sections of public land outside the more restricted Boundary Waters area itself.

A genuinely generous free camping option, though specific rules and permits should be confirmed ahead of time, especially near the wilderness boundary.

Hotels surrounding the Mall of America put you within walking distance of the shopping and entertainment complex itself.