Voyageurs National Park
Near International Falls, Minnesota
Just east of town lies the only national park in Minnesota, and one of the strangest in the whole system, because you cannot really drive into it. Voyageurs National Park, established in nineteen seventy five, is a maze of more than three hundred and forty square miles of lakes, islands, and streams wrapped around the Kabetogama Peninsula. Nearly eighty four thousand acres of it are water, spread across four large lakes and dozens of smaller interior ones.
In most national parks you arrive by car and walk. Here the main roads are the waterways themselves, and the primary way in is by boat, canoe, or kayak. The park is named for the voyageurs, the French Canadian fur traders who paddled these routes long before there was a border here.
They moved beaver pelts and trade goods in birch bark canoes, following a chain of lakes and rivers that stretched from Montreal deep into the Canadian northwest. Their customary water highway became so well established that it helped define the boundary line between the United States and Canada. Today the same waters carry anglers, houseboaters, and paddlers past loons, wolves, and some of the darkest night skies in the country, where the northern lights often ripple overhead.
