Minnesota Hiking Club #18 - Nerstrand-Big Woods State Park

 

Minnesota Hiking Club

#18 - Nerstrand-Big Woods State Park

Date Hiked: January 1st, 2025

Other Hikes That Day: Rice Lake State Park, Sakatah Lake State Park

Wanderloon Ranking System Score: 3.92

It was New Year's Day, and I was alone.

We established that in the previous two entries, but it is impossible to talk about this hike without that context. 

I don't care about the World's Biggest Non-Event, but for the previous two years, I had spent that time with my special people. For reasons that are irrelevant to this medium, I was not, and it would've been really easy to be swallowed by that pit. This day is what led to the January 4th trilogy, which as you will likely note, none of those have yet reached this list. And somewhere along the way, I decided to do all of them in a single season. 

But this trilogy of hikes was just a means of not falling into a pit of despair and longing. It became mystical, and though I didn't stop missing my people at all, I found something to do with the energy, and that's the theme of this entire series. This is how I spent the time and energy that came out of being far away from my special people, and a descent into dense woods and frozen waterfalls truly kickstarted the concept. This was, by far, the best of these three. 

All three are within a reasonable range. Before I started going to the one farthest away and working my way back as a concept, Nerstrand-Big Woods was the closest of the three, and I don't think I even decided to do all three when I initially set out. i just wanted a place to be that wasn't in my own head, listening to the sound of water swallowing me and finding it even ironically endearing. 

Nerstrand-Big Woods State Park preserves magical forest in an area of the state where that kind of landscape isn't expected if you don't know where to look for it. I know I tend to be sentimental and a bit flowery with my language with the parks I really like, but this one truly is descending into a New World Fangorn without murder by swallowing or stomping, naturally. The loop shape isn't complicated, looking like a stone giant champion bowler trophy, but its sub-3 mile length is deceiving, for it is not a quick jaunt, especially once ice on the terrain is factored in.

The first notable sight along the trail is the waterfall, and early in the morning on a lonely New Year's Day, it didn't make everything okay, but it allowed me to forget about the gnawing in my soul for a little while. The fog of the latter two trails this day wasn't quite as present, but it gave the woods of the big and Nerstrand variety an even more ethereal feeling than the circumstances of the day already provided. 

This journey was never meant to be some kind of diary, as the people reading this initially are already aware of the emotional context, but this Hiking Club speedrun was never just about completing the hikes themselves either.