Minneapolis to Lake Itasca

We drove up to Itasca State Park today, where the Headwaters of the Mississippi are. If you click on the map above, you will find many details of our drive up, including various kinds of maps etc. The feature I like best is the Google Earth export. You can view and fly along the route by clicking on the Google Earth link below the map you will find. For this drive, it is clearly not too interesting, but every day I will post maps of my ride, and you can come along, virtually. Try it out, it should be fun.

First things first, we made a fire and ate almost all the food we had brought, no small feat that I had not thought possible. But it was delicious. This is how delicious it was:

This was, in part, an effort to warm Ericca up to the joys of camping, but it turned out that the campground was completely taken over by what the inimitable Sarah Heimel calls breeders. That is, suburban parents with more kids than they can handle, which the kids are all too aware of. The result was that it felt more like being in Blaine than at a campground. This picture may not do the situation justice, but it's the best I have:

After a little digestive nap, we made our way to the Headwaters, where you can jump from Lake Itasca into the Mississippi. Clearly, those rocks that separate Lake Itasca from the Mississippi did not get there naturally. They were placed there as part of a 1930's improvement project.

I then went for a little walk down the Mississippi, where it is only about an armspan wide. This lead directly to the first Mississippi River Crossing:

Mississippi River Crossing 1

So is Lake Itasca really the source of the Mississippi? You betcha. In 1889, Jacob Vradenburg Brower conducted a survey to settle once and for all the lingering controversy over the true source of the Mississippi River. He concluded:

There are five creeks entering Lake Itasca, none large enough to be called a river. It is only as the outlet to Lake Itasca where a true river is formed.

We rounded off the evening by taking a little boat out onto Lake Itasca, which appears very shallow and full of weeds. But it really is beautiful.

Lake Itasca, in the heart of the Loon State