In the spring of 2007 a wildfire raged in the Ham Lake area of the Boundary Waters near the Gunflint trail.

The fire burned more than 118 square miles of mature, wild forest and destroyed more than 130 structures.

But in TODAY'S "Nature Matters" David Hoole talks with those who say nature has a way of healing all wounds.

It's definitely something people need to adjust to but we still have a lot of old forest. And this is something we won't see for very long so it's good to take advantage of looking at it for 10 to 15 years.

That's our low bush blueberry. Shiny leaves, no hair on the stems, and this blueberry has a lot more.

We found a bunch of blueberries! We're going to make a bunch of blueberry pancakes tomorrow we came out and stopped at the trailhead and found some raspberries and now we've got blueberries.

This is a dead balsam tree and growing out of it is fringe bindweed. This is one of the plants that really takes off after fire. Fringe bindweed will take advantage of localized disturbance and then as the forest grows it will decline in number.

The large leafed asters flourish after the fire too.

They, for the most part, are just basal leaves near the forest floor. But when you get a disturbance like fire you end up with many more of the plants actually flowering. The purple is Fireweed, one of our native plants that likes disturbance and has these beautiful magenta flowers.

This birch tree died in the fire and now all of these are stump sprouts from the original root stock that is down behind this rock.

The diversity in live vs. dead provides a mix of habitat in a small area - so that would be an area that would be more suitable for species that like smaller openings. We've had many smaller fires and those are advantageous to certain species but the size of this burn is more like historical burns that happened before Europeans came and that scale is really important to animals like Moose.

The U-S Forest Service determined this fire started at a campsite left unattended by careless campers.