Minnesota Hiking Club #20 - Fort Snelling State Park

 

Minnesota Hiking Club

#20 - Fort Snelling State Park

Date Hiked: February 3rd, 2025

Other Hikes That Day: None

Wanderloon Ranking System Score: 3.58

What on earth is a completely flat trail doing this high on the list? 

Everything is not only subjective, but context-heavy on this countdown. 

Like with Fort Ridgely, I cannot emphasize enough that the Hiking Club trail is by far not the most important thing about this place. Fort Snelling is a place of historical significance that is not for me to describe or delve into. It is not my place. 

But hey, I wasn't dodging horseshit, so Battle of the Forts: won. 

Fort Snelling State Park is basically also Historical Fort Snelling. In the biggest population center of the state by a significant margin, I doubt there's anyone in the metro who doesn't know what Fort Snelling is, even if they don't know why it's important. How can you miss it? It's a giant-ass fort on a ridge on the river, which is why it was practical when it was built! The state park is technically separate, but even the surrounding area is also incredibly important to Indigenous people, far beyond the atrocity that happened there. Without giving a spoiler, I am very glad to see that even the Hiking Club password has been updated in recent times to reflect that. 

A light snow was falling. It was cold but not polar vortex cold. The snow was fresh enough that either the W-code didn't apply, or it's Fort Snelling and nobody cared. I felt a little guilty about this one, but I saw people running on this loop, so this was the one time I was willing to make the exception to break it. To be perfectly honest, I really wanted to knock off a password and a stamp, but I also didn't want to go anywhere. Fort Snelling is less than ten minutes away, and I had it in my back pocket for that exact reason: the mid-speedrun blues, because that's a thing that makes sense, right?

It's a midrange hike, so though there isn't any elevation gain, there's at least some distance to be earned for the Hiking Club booklet. The Fort Snelling Hiking Club trail itself is the Pike Island loop, which in the spring last year was completely off-limits due to the confluence of the two rivers essentially becoming one big fuck-off rapids rampage. There are a litany of hikes in this exact area, and I've done all of them. Crosby Farms, Pike Island, Hidden Falls, the Greenway, Big Rivers regional, so I've been on one while photographing the other. It is a gorgeous area, and in the quiet snow, knowing it'll be too packed and loud to move on all fronts soon, I had an easy hike that was absolutely magical. 

The Pike Island loop isn't the best hike in the park, as it's once again a sampler. But getting to the point where the rivers meet and looking out toward St. Paul with the ridges and woods on each side, in what is somehow the middle of the metro, it's pretty freaking awesome.