Trail Overview
This trail winds through a pine forest and features several facilities for visitors, including a boat launch, a picnic area, and a campsite that is divided into two sections. One part of the campground tends to attract families and those looking to spend time by the water. The campground offers hand-pumped water and basic but clean drop toilets. There is no electricity, but cell service is reliable. Because of the established infrastructure in the area, the trail itself is wide and regularly maintained, although sections can be quite corrugated. Numerous smaller tracks branch off from the main route.
History
Covering more than 1.6 million acres of glacial lakes, red-pine uplands, and sphagnum bogs, Minnesota's Chippewa National Forest lets motorists experience the North Woods at an unrushed pace. Paved state highways soon yield to a lattice of numbered forest roads, most of them well-graded gravel that thread between kettle ponds and stands of towering white pine, the tree that helped earn the forest its 1908 designation as one of America's first national forests. The forest harbors one of the highest breeding densities of bald eagles in the continental United States, and patient drivers often glimpse loons, black bears, and white-tailed deer as they move from shoreline to clear-cut regrowth and back again.
