Itasca County

The county in brief

A traveler's read on Itasca County

Fifteen feet wide and roughly two feet deep at the headwaters weir where the Mississippi River exits Lake Itasca — a scale at which the visitor can wade across the entire river in eleven stepping-stones and claim to have crossed the Mississippi on foot, an experience the park ranger staff at Itasca State Park have built half the visitor-center interpretive program around. The river that exits Lake Itasca at 1,475 ft elevation in northwestern Itasca County will grow to a mile wide and 200 ft deep before reaching the Gulf of Mexico 2,340 river miles south. Itasca State Park, established 1891 to preserve the headwaters region from the late-19th-century logging frenzy that was clearing every old-growth pine within rail-haul distance, is Minnesota's oldest state park and protects 32,000 acres of the last remaining contiguous old-growth red pine and white pine stand in Minnesota per DNR forest inventory data.

Itasca County's 2,666 sq mi wrap the Mississippi headwaters region, the Chippewa National Forest's southern half (the only national forest with a federally-designated forest plan explicitly prioritizing bald-eagle nesting habitat — the Chippewa NF holds the highest density of breeding bald eagles in the contiguous United States per USFWS Twin Cities Field Office annual survey, roughly one nesting pair per 4 sq mi), and Grand Rapids (population 11,126, the county seat, the boyhood home of Judy Garland — born Frances Gumm at 2727 Hwy 169 South — and the location of the Judy Garland Museum). The Edge of the Wilderness Scenic Byway (47 paved miles north from Grand Rapids on MN-38 through Chippewa NF to the Boundary Waters approach at Effie) is the canonical Itasca County RV touring route, with two-lane geometry accommodating rigs to 40 ft. Itasca SP campground accepts rigs to 45 ft with electric hookups across 223 sites on the ReserveAmerica Minnesota platform. Chippewa National Forest dispersed-camping sites concentrate along the Bowstring Lake and Cut Foot Sioux loop with rigs to 35 ft accommodated under the standard 14-day stay limit. McCarthy Beach and Lake Bemidji state parks (the latter just outside the county) anchor the secondary RV-friendly bases. Schoolcraft State Park 25 miles southeast preserves the rare jack pine ecosystem.