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Please see the August 5, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

Lake of the Woods, between Minnesota and two provinces of Canada, is one of the world's largest lakes. It is ocean-like in its size and moods. It has 65,000 miles of shoreline and 14,000 islands! Where this picture was taken at Zippel Bay at the south end of the lake it's 80 miles across to the northern tip of the lake! It is 55 miles across at its widest. You are seeing the lake on a calm day, when the waves were lapping mildly at the sandy shoreline. On stormy, windy days the waves crash in like the ocean surf, and they can be very high and dangerous.

Up on the west side of the lake, sticking out on a large peninsula, is an area of the United States called the Northwest Angle. The only land it is connected to is in Manitoba, Canada, and the only way to get to it without going through Canada is by boat. The "angle" is the result of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, when the United States Revolutionary War was over and the United States was setting the Canadian boundary with England. The language of the treaty stated that the northwest corner of the Lake of the Woods would belong to the United States. But how do you determine the northwest corner of a lake so irregular in shape? The wording resulted in fifty years of controversy that ended in 1842 when a treaty between the United States and Britain officially established the present boundary between the two countries.

Please see the August 9, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

Voyageurs National Park is dominated by water. Within the park's boundaries are more than thirty lakes of varying sizes which fill glacier-carved rock basins. Once you arrive at one of the park's four entry points, you leave your car behind and set out on water, just as the voyageurs traveled during the fur trade of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Today motor boats and houseboats, as well as canoes and kayaks, ply the waters of the park. Although some campgrounds in the park are accessible by car, others can be reached only by boat. There are trails for hiking in summer and for snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, and snowmobiling in the winter. There is even a seven-mile-long ice road across part of Rainy Lake that provides automobile access into the park in the winter time!

Find Rainy Lake on a map and compare its size to that of Lake of the Woods. The Voyageurs used both lakes to transport beaver pelts. Which lake would have taken them the longest to cross?

The route of the Voyageurs through Rainy Lake became so established that the 1783 treaty ending the American Revolution specified that the international boundary should follow their "customary waterway" between Lake Superior and Lake of the Woods. Today, Voyageurs National Park, established in 1975, adjoins a 56-mile stretch of the Voyageurs Highway.

Picture: 2.7 billion year old rock

Voyageurs National Park lies in the southern portion of the Canadian Shield. The ancient sediments that comprise the shield represent some of the oldest rock formations exposed anywhere in the world. Younger rock formations do not appear here. Perhaps they never existed, but more likely glaciation simply removed them. At least four times in the past one million years, continental glaciers--ice sheets two miles thick--bulldozed their way through the area. They removed previous features, leaving mostly level, pock-marked rock up to 2.7 billion years old. Hundreds of ponds, lakes, and streams now nestle in the depressions, and some rock surfaces in the park still bear the scrape marks. Why could we say that the Voyageurs Highway through all these lakes was actually a gift of the glaciers?