So welcome back to Grand Adventure! I'm your host Marc Guido, and we are at
the headwaters of the Mississippi at Itasca State Park in Minnesota.
Come along for the ride!
This may look like the creek out behind your house, but this, folks,
is the mighty Mississippi River.
The waters of Lake Itasca in northwestern Minnesota
spill through the outlet and form a tiny stream that forms our nation's most
important river, and travels for more than 2,500 miles to
the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi's watershed drains all
or parts of 32 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces,
between the Rockies and the Appalachians. It is one of the most important routes
for transporting goods to and from the American Heartland.
That's all hard to believe here in Minnesota's Itasca State Park,
where you can walk on stepping stones or wade across the Mississippi in three or
four seconds. We expected there to be a few people
here, but we weren't prepared for this crowd of people
wanting to see the source of the Mississippi River for themselves.
A half million people visit Itasca State Park annually.
Itasca State Park is massive, encompassing more than 32,000
acres of woodlands and 157 lakes north of Park Rapids, Minnesota.
Established in 1891 to preserve the old growth red pine forests
surrounding Itasca Lake from logging, it was Minnesota's first state park
and only the second in the nation.
This site consists of 10 burial mounds dating back approximately 800 years
along the northeastern shore of Lake Itasca.
Douglas Lodge, built in 1905, is the oldest surviving building in the park,
constructed using peeled logs harvested from the surrounding
forests. There are two campgrounds in Itasca State Park,
including the Bear Paw Campground along Lake Itasca's eastern shore that we're
driving through here. Both campgrounds include RV sites with
electrical hookups. We had hoped to stay here, but with the
park's popularity we couldn't find a vacancy for our
necessary dates.
So that's how we ended up here at Country Campground in Detroit Lakes,
Minnesota, about an hour's drive away from the
headwaters of the Mississippi. The owners here have been fantastic to
work with, and the grounds are meticulously maintained.
Our generous pull-through full-hookup site costs $38 per night.
They call Minnesota the "Land of 1,000 Lakes".
This is known as "knob and kettle" country. The knobs are mounds of debris deposited
directly by the ice near the edge of glaciers that retreated
10,000 years ago, while the kettles are depressions
usually filled with water, formed by dormant ice masses buried or
partially buried under glacial debris that later melted.
The glacial moraine here covers the landscape to a depth
of around 680 feet.
The year-round population of Detroit Lakes is around 8,500 people, but it
swells to more than 13,000 during the summer
months, according to some estimates. It's located 45 miles east of Fargo,
North Dakota, and around 200 miles northwest of the
Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan region. The city grew
quickly after its founding in the 1870s, thanks to the construction of the
Northern Pacific railroad. These days, tourism is the region's
primary industry.
A mile-long city beach on Detroit Lake lines West Lake Drive,
also home to several bars and restaurants that capitalize on their
lakeside location.
There's always something compelling that draws us to man's creations that have
fallen into disuse and disrepair, whether it's the ghost towns of the wild
west, empty riverfront factories in the northeast,
or this stretch of U.S. Route 10 that was abandoned
when the road was rebuilt and rerouted around Detroit Lakes in the 1970s.
Perhaps it's our short human attention spans. Maybe it's our desire as a species
to always build something bigger and better,
or possibly it's to observe our planet's ability to reclaim what we no longer
have a use for anymore. No matter why, they will always serve as
an apt metaphor for our insignificant and fleeting place on this
There are a couple of other summer vacation communities surrounding the
other lakes in this area that we'd like to visit. The first is Walker,
with a population of around 1,000 that's much smaller than Detroit Lakes.
A rough frontier town at its founding in the 1890s
following construction of the railroad, Walker first built its fortunes on
logging before transitioning to tourism during the 20th century.
Walker is situated on the southwest corner of Leech Lake,
Minnesota's third largest lake and the largest one contained entirely within
the state.
Bemidji is the largest of the three towns that we're visiting with a
population of over 15,000. It's at the center of three Indian
reservations, and is also the alleged birthplace of
the legendary lumberjack Paul Bunyan. The Rotarians of Bemidji
commissioned this statue of Paul Bunyan during the Great Depression as a tourist
attraction. The wood industry is still a significant
part of the local economy.
So we truly hope that you've enjoyed visiting this corner of northwestern
Minnesota and the headwaters of the Mississippi
River with us! Coming up next week our #AmericanHeartlandTour2020
may be making its shortest move ever! We're heading just a few miles west to
the area around Fargo, North Dakota, so if you're not yet
a Grand Adventurer this is the perfect time to go smash that little red
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We'll see you then.