Minnesota Hiking Club #42 - Buffalo River State Park

 

Minnesota Hiking Club

#42 - Buffalo River State Park

Date Hiked: February 2nd, 2025

Other Hikes That Day: Maplewood State Park

Wanderloon Ranking System Score: 2.83

This is one of those trails that was awesome, but also even with AllTrails, I went the wrong way multiple times. 

I mean, but also don't show me a bridge I'm not supposed to go over. Put it on the route. It's the rules.

Despite it being cold enough to make Winterfell seem like spring break, I set out for two parks down the 94, rather close to where we would go to visit the Gerhardts and immediately regret our life choices. Or at least notice that Skip Sprang still hasn't opened his damn typewriter shop yet. 

Buffalo River State Park is in that weird space of Minnesota where it's sorta close to Fargo, sorta close to Detroit Lakes, sorta close to other places, but not really anywhere. The Hiking Club trail is technically a loop? Although there's a small spur to get to it, but to call this shape a loop is to distort all but the most technical meanings of the word. It looks like I tried to draw the shape of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan while blindfolded and after five glasses of Cabernet to bring out Red Wine Wanderloon. 

And the snow doesn't help one to follow this creation of red-inspired delusion. On this day, the path was ice covered in snow, and I congratulated myself once again for using those ice spikes, or I might've added self-luge to the sports in the brochure several times. 

Some of this park is current riverside, while part of it contains the geological features of former coastlines. Prairie hikes may often be a forgotten third behind the other landscapes Minnesota has to offer, even within the state park system itself, but this one shows out really well. The ancient Lake Agassiz once covered this area, meaning that I was technically hiking on beachfront property. That could've made me some kind of prototypical ice wight Mitch Buchannon. My save! 

Though the picture in the brochure indicates the possibility of moose sightings, in that aspect, it chalked up to be another zero in the lifetime quota. However, on that type of landscape in levels of cold that even moose themselves likely find ridiculous, it's probably an advantage. Who wants to add "moose-dodging" to their resume when they're just anxious to find out how long it'll take after the car's heated up to remember they do, in fact, have cheeks? Sometimes the adventurous ambitions take a backseat to practicality, though considering the nature of this speedrun, I'm not one to preach on such reasonable comparative analysis. 

Like many of these parks, I have no idea what it looks like in bloom and during bug invasions, but I imagine the possibilities are extensive. The geological ancient lakebed with a river flowing through, woods in the prairie, and the natural draw of the wilderness likely make this an even more impressive visit when temperatures don't have that pesky minus in front of them. It's a solid mid-range hike with elevation changes and scenic surroundings.