Lookout over Rainy Lake, Voyageurs National Park, Minnesota. Photograph © Layne Kennedy/Corbis

Big Water: Voyageurs National Park
By Leigh Marjamaa

In the early afternoon of an Indian summer day, my best friend and I heft a 90-pound canoe over our heads and set off on a half-mile portage toward Mukooda Lake. We've just paddled from My Island and Your Island, through Sand Point Lake, to a heron-filled bay. We are exploring Voyageurs National Park, a 218,200-acre wonderland of forests, lakes, bogs, swamps, and rocky islands on the northern border of Minnesota. Despite the weight of our canoe, we barely break a sweat, cooled by a 60-degree breeze. Later, we paddle through a V-shaped rock formation at King William Narrows that leads to Crane Lake and Indian Island. Voyageurs is named for the 17th-century French fur trappers whose trade route defined the U.S.-Canadian border. Today, the park is one of the few places in the continental United States where you can rent a canoe and escape—if only for a weekend—into a wilderness inhabited by bald eagles, eastern timber wolves, black bears, and dozens of other species of wildlife. At night, you nestle into one of 210 campsites.

For a posher experience, you can rent a houseboat equipped with beds, kitchen, BBQ grill, even a hot tub.

But I prefer to reconnoiter via canoe—a tradition passed from native Ojibwa to voyageurs then on to modern paddlers. Though by now thoroughly explored, Voyageurs is still a place of discovery.

The information in this story was accurate at the time it was published, but we suggest you confirm all details before making travel plans.