The Great Outdoors at Itasca State Park

With the deep freeze of winter hovering ominously on the horizon, we looked to make the most of the last remnants of summer this past week as we headed to Itasca State Park in Northern Minnesota.

The notion of exploring “The Great Outdoors”, conjuring images of log cabins, toasting marshmallows on open fires and hiking through densely-packed pine forests, has always appealed to the romantic in me.

The headwaters of the Mississippi River at Itasca State Park.

It combines the pleasure of being close to the nature with the excitement of being cut off from the world, but at the same time provides this feeling of comfort and familiarity akin to watching a John Hughes movie on a Sunday afternoon.

The centrepiece of the park is Lake Itasca, which is a small body of water by Minnesotan standards, but famous for being the starting point of the the 2,552-mile Mississippi River.

We timed our visit well. We got there the day after Labor Day, typically considered the end of the summer season, so we were sharing more than 32,000 acres of park with only a handful of people.

We arrived on Tuesday afternoon and hired a couple of bikes, cycling a couple of miles to the northern tip of Lake Itasca to visit the Mississippi headwaters.

It’s the done thing at the headwaters to cross the Mississippi, with a collection of rocks making a short, if slippery, crossing to the bank on the other side.

It doesn’t look difficult to cross the Mississippi here…and it isn’t, really.

The water here is barely two feet deep, so it’s a far cry from the sprawling torrent the river eventually becomes as it bisects the United States and passes through cities including Minneapolis, St Louis and Memphis before eventually draining into the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans.

After crossing the river and taking a few pictures we cycled back down the eastern shore, but this trip was cut short by my moaning – I hadn’t eaten or drank anything for several hours and every slight incline in the path prompted groans that naturally (or unreasonably, depending on your viewpoint) irritated Alex.

We stayed in a basic but cosy wood cabin hotel called Douglas Lodge, where I pigged out on wild rice soup – a Minnesota delicacy – and a bison burger.

Douglas Lodge hotel at Itasca State Park. Not quite the log cabin I had envisaged in my mind, but cosy nonetheless.

We resolved to do see more of the park on Wednesday and this time I wisely filled up with an omelette, toast and water before we set off to cycle a trail which cuts a circuit around the park totalling around 20 miles.

This was the American country as I’d imagined it, with tree-lined roads, woodpeckers hammering away as birds of prey soar overhead, and everywhere the smell of fresh pine.

We stopped about nine miles in to go on a short hike along a nature trail to a nearby lake – unfortunately we forgot to bring insect repellent.

Do you know that feeling of dread you get when you don’t feel ill right now, but you know it’s coming in the near future? That’s the feeling I had throughout the hike. I spent the whole walk wind-milling my arms as mosquitoes dived-bombed onto my body.  It was so bad that we actually ran the last half of the trail to reduce our exposure.

I put that to the back of my mind as we stopped again later on, this time to climb the 100-ft tall fire lookout tower at the south of the lake, which swayed quite sickeningly the closer we got to the top.

The view from the top of the fire lookout tower. Those with a fear of heights might not enjoy the climb.

The view was almost worth the terror, showing a vast expanse of trees as far as the eye could see, but what was more interesting was learning that we were at the point of a continental divide, with water either side of tower draining into either the Gulf of Mexico or Canada’s Hudson Bay.

The next morning my worst fears had been realised: I was absolutely covered in bites. I stopped counting when I reached 60, with my shoulders, arms and the back of my neck the worst hit.

In retrospect, it probably wasn’t a great idea to go swimming in the lake immediately after our cycle, exposing even more fresh skin for the mosquitoes, and the forest of angry red bumps on our skin somewhat soured our appetites for the three-hour hike we’d planned for Thursday morning.

But it did nothing to sour our time at the park. People have since told me that it wouldn’t be a true Minnesotan outdoor experience without being attacked by mosquitoes, though it’s funny how that aspect of “The Great Outdoors” hasn’t made it across the Atlantic!