Minnesota Hiking Club #11 - Grand Portage State Park

 

Minnesota Hiking Club

#11 - Grand Portage State Park

Date Hiked: February 15th, 2025

Other Hikes That Day: Judge C.R. Magney State Park

Wanderloon Ranking System Score: 4.17

Did I just rank another rest stop state park hike ridiculously high? 

Yep. 

But if you can see a giant frozen waterfall on the border of Canada, are you really going to be blasè about it? If you said yes, you're a stronger person than me. 

Grand Portage State Park, near the Grand Portage of greater historical and cultural context for which I am not equipped to explain or on which to elaborate, is close enough to Canada to yell "yo what's up, eh?" and have someone respond from the other side. Though given the current cultural landscape (upon writing, April 8th, who knows how bad it's gotten by the time this gets posted?) maybe they'd apologize before telling us to go fuck ourselves, and as we nodded and got back into the Cyber Truck equivalent of a country, both in design and likelihood to spontaneously combust, we'd know we deserved it. 

Grand Portage's Hiking Club trail itself is nothing that special, but it's the experience that makes this such a magnanimously regarded trek. It isn't that long, there's not much elevation gain, and even with ice and snow everywhere, it didn't feel that dangerous. But holy shit, is the payoff worth any other factor within this Hiking Club against which it should be ranked? Obviously not, it made it this high. Though I can't help but note that I don't speak of this day with the same reverence of which I lauded the January 4th trilogy, and both of these are ranked higher than two of those three. Sometimes the statistics don't tell the whole story, but that's what this travelogue is there to do in the absence of experiencing it firsthand. 

I won't lie, before I saw those falls, I was annoyed as hell. Not because of the trails, but because during the previous hike at Magney, the trail was littered with non-hiker couples who decided hiking was what they were going to do on Valentine's Day weekend. That of itself is fine, if a bit obnoxious, but the contempt for which they held the only solo hiker there, or so it felt, made me resent all of them, and I'm not even single! 

Make no mistake, I was missing my people hard, and while I was happy for them and what they were doing, this is yet another time I ran far away toward escapism rather than deal with the shit going on in the present. Yet it caught up to me anyway. It always does. I was far better equipped to deal with it than I was on January 4th, but progress isn't always linear and dead demons don't always stay deceased. 

What's there to say about this trail itself? It's barely a hike by any standards, but it's got a giant fuckoff waterfall to pay it off. It's not even really a trail, if we're being fully transparent. But this is my travelogue and my subjective ranking system all the same. Grand Portage is amazing.