Minnesota Hiking Club #51 - McCarthy Beach State Park

 

Minnesota Hiking Club

#51 - McCarthy Beach State Park

Date Hiked: March 9th, 2025

Other Hikes That Day: Bear Head Lake State Park

Wanderloon Ranking System Score: 2.58

Even the Hiking Club booklet mentions loons in the description, so you know I'm gonna get excited about it, even when I'm well aware I'm not gonna hear any tremolos or yodels on March 9th. 

It's one of the harder trails to find, even as the park itself is not. The presence of a private residence makes you feel like you'd better turn around rather than continue on. As the W codes were being lifted due to a Minnesota late winter heatwave, which for most other states would still be too cold to be outside, I was knocking them off the list while traveling past ones I'd visited in much colder times. Bear Head Lake would've been an easy pairing with Lake Vermilion-Soudan Underground Mine State Park, but when I hiked there, the snow was several feet high, so I wasn't breaking the code, convenient as it would've been. The state of McCarthy Beach's Hiking Club trail, though, made me yearn for the Soudan trail's compacted snow on top of which I could walk.

While skiing may no longer have been practical for this trail, at least for a day or two at that point, the trail was a fine mix of thick ice and enough slush for an establishing shot in Fargo. The attention to which watersports is paid in the descriptions of this park tell me that hiking may not be the most conducive way to experience this place, even when one isn't cursing whichever trickster god they prefer on whom to blame for the existence of slush as it permeates the legs of their pants and insides of their socks. 

Though I have fallen backwards into the outdoorsy cultures of hiking and kayaking on my own, I'm not Minnesotan enough to have added fishing, hunting, and/or camping to that list. I love being outside all day, but when it's time to sleep, it's the last place I want to be, tent or not. I love being at lakes, but I have no desire to get inside a boat with a hook-based springy stick to take food away from herons and eagles. Nor do I have any desire to leave my hook-based springy stick leftovers stuck in the trees, or the beer cans I've emptied in the process. I've heard many discuss the peace of being on the lake and immersing themselves in nature through fishing, and I'm always like "you know you can do that without the pole, right?" And hunting? No. That is all. 

I only say that because even the state park's website calls the watersports/beach "famous" while referring to the trails as "hidden gems." And that's fine, because the diversity of these parks in Minnesota's vast array of landscapes allow for the foci to vary based on what fits them. This one just makes me painfully aware that I'm a transplant, even after eight years of being here, and that's perfectly okay, but I still don't want to partake in them either.