Posts Tagged With: MN Hiking Club trails

Itasca State Park, MN May 13, 2021

We have truly lucked out with the weather. Most of the day was sunny with a temperature in the 60s. It became a little cloudy in the afternoon with about a 10 minute brief shower after 4 PM. All of our walks today were within Itasca State Park. The park is over 32,000 acres in size with over 100 lakes. There is plenty of area to experience. We chose a variety of trails today. The first trail is part of the hiking club trail system within Minnesota state parks.

Previous readers of this blog will recall that in our travels around Minnesota, we obtain a stamp from each park to verify we have visited the park. We are currently in our second time through the list of state parks and we have been to 27 of the 75 state parks and recreation areas. Each park has had signs indicating a trail with the words Hiking Club. In our first go around, we were unaware of the “Hiking Club” and assumed it was a membership type group.

Later we discovered the Hiking Club is simply one recommended trail at each park to hike. There is a separate Hiking Club booklet where you enter the date you made the hike and you are rewarded with patches, etc. Well, the patches are not our motivation but since we plan to visit each park, we decided this time to walk the Hiking Club trail as we visit each park. To make sure one does not cheat, there is a password associated with each hike. Of course, you find the password at about the halfway mark of each designated trail. As we take the hike, Chris and I have been guessing what the password might be. It is usually related in some way to the park or the trail. Today’s password was Omushkos.

Omushkos is the Ojibwe word for Elk Lake which was the Ojibwe name for Lake Itasca. Itasca was given as its new name by Henry Schoolcraft who “discovered” the lake and named it for the Latin words for truth (veritas ITAS) and head (caput CA ). Of course, Schoolcraft only “discovered” the lake because a Native American leader named Ozaawindib guided him here.

The trail today for the Hiking Club was 3.5 miles and traversed the Deer Park path, a crossover path, and the Ozaawindib path. In this part of Minnesota, glaciers did not leave the flat agricultural lands one finds to the south and west. Instead there is a series of hills, valleys, and indentations that created a hike of ascents and descents over terrain that varies between sand and rocks and tree roots.

Luckily, we were able to be delighted by the vistas. Tall pines, new growth aspen and birch, blue lakes and skies, marshes and lovely wildflowers. The wind was loud but seemed to only blow at the level of the tree tops. We could hear it but rarely felt it. On the trails we took, the wildflowers were usually small and just starting to have fully emerged. White, yellow and blue blooms were abundant but no pink or red were to be seen.

After lunch of tuna salad and crackers back at our cabin, we tackled several smaller hikes located along the Wilderness Drive. Wilderness Drive makes a circle through part of the park and road can be used by cars and bikes. Each of the shorter hikes has a theme: trees blown down by wind, areas replanted by the CCC, etc. Frankly, the Hiking Club trail was more interesting and delightful; even if more tiring.

For dinner we ate at McDonalds as we returned to Park Rapids to upload photos. Just because I bought more data time did not mean the Internet speed out here at the park increased.

Tomorrow we return home with an intermediate stop at Charles Lindbergh State Park in Little Falls, MN. Our blog post from 2014 Trip Five, Aug. 14 discussed the Lindbergh home historic site. The state park is separate.

Ed Heimel, Chris Klejbuk May 13, 2021