Minnesota
Hard, ancient basement rock underneath glacier-carved depressions means no place for water to go—creating a landscape of lakes and rivers in Voyageurs National Park.
In the eighteenth century, beaver-skin top hats were all the rage in Europe. The fashion trend fueled the fur industry in North America at a time when much of the continent was still uncharted, giving rise to legendary fur trappers—hardy mountain men who had more in common with the animals they pursued than the gentlemen they outfitted. One of the most productive regions of the New World for beaver furs was the lake-rich zone between northern Minnesota and Canada, now Voyageurs National Park.
From on high, the area appears as a mass of interconnected lakes and rivers. Visitors here can canoe or kayak for weeks at a time on 350 square miles of waterways. Almost a third of the park is water and most access through the park is by boat.
The foundation for this watery expanse was laid starting 3.96 billion years ago, when the Precambrian rocks of the Canadian Shield were among the first rocks to form on young, molten Earth. The Canadian Shield is the ancient geologic core of the North American continent that roughly encircles Hudson Bay and extends south into the northern Great Lakes region.
This foundation of very old, very hard, very eroded rock, in addition to the region’s history of extensive glaciation, helps explain why central Canada has so many lakes. Water that collects on top of these basement rocks has nowhere to go. And the continental-wide glaciers that originated from Hudson Bay during the last ice age carved and scooped out countless depressions and bowls in the landscape, creating the extensive networks of lakes we see today.
Voyageurs National Park was established in 1975 and named for the French-Canadian fur trappers and canoeists who frequented the boundary waters between the United States and Canada two centuries earlier. Commemorated in folklore and song, the voyageurs (French for travelers) were once celebrities on par with Wild West cowboys, gold miners, and outlaws. Not only did these men trap beaver and other wild animals by the millions, they also transported the valuable pelts over hundreds of miles of wilderness by canoe, depositing their goods a few times a year at trading posts before lighting out again for unknown waters.
Some of the oldest rocks on the planet underlie Voyageurs National Park, seen here from space on the border between Minnesota and Ontario.
You might fly over Voyageurs National Park on your way to Thunder Bay, Ontario; Winnipeg, Manitoba; or Duluth, Minnesota.
