This is Lake of the Woods, and like most lakes in most woods, it’s full of water.
But in 2020, resourceful Minnesotans made it a homemade highway to the middle of nowhere.
Let me explain.
The point of the highway was to connect Minnesota’s mainland to the Northwest Angle, an isolated
corner of the North Star State with about 120 residents and no Cheesecake Factories.
It’s only about 120 square miles, or 320 square kilometers, making it smaller than
Tampa, Florida; Vienna, Austria; and the island nation of Palau… combined.
And like Tampalaustria, Minnesota’s Northwest Angle is home to some of the best walleye
fishing around.
And it better be some of the best walleye fishing around, because getting there is,
to put it lightly, a massive pain.
All you border quirk stans probably already know why that is, so just get to know each
other in the comments while I get the normal people up to speed.
Hi normal people!
Welcome to the channel.
We’re gonna do this as fast as we can.
In 1783, the Treaty of Paris treatied that the US-Canada border would go through some
water like this, up to the northwest corner of Lake of the Woods, then go due west ‘til
it hit the Mississippi.
But it turns out that’s impossible because the Mississippi starts down here, so, you
know, oops.
Fast forward a few years, this is still unresolved, and a new border has entered the chat: the
49th parallel!
So the British are like “what if our border was just where the 49th parallel meets that
line from before,” to which the Americans say “YOU’LL PRY THE LAND YOU GAVE US OUT
OF OUR COLD, DEAD, FREEDOM-LOVING HANDS.”
Then the Brits suggested dropping a vertical line from the old border to the new one and
the US was like “no” but then they were like “yeah.”
And then when they found out about the Northwest Angle, the Brits were like “this is silly,
we’ll buy that land so we can do the clean border” and the US was like “YOU’LL
PRY—” and the Brits were like “okay we get it” now the Angle is officially Viking
country.
Phew!
So now, getting from this part of Minnesota to this part of Minnesota involves two international
border crossings.
When could that possibly be a problem?
If you guessed March 21st, 2020, congrats, you’re right.
That was when, due to stuff, the US-Canada border shut down for all non-essential travel.
Unsurprisingly, this devastated the Northwest Angle’s fishing resort-dependent economy,
and while in the summer of 2020, you could get a water taxi there from a guy named Gregg,
the winter options were generally too expensive or too inconvenient.
So, the resort workers on the Angle hatched the perfect plan: turn the frozen lake into
a highway.
The Northwest Angle Guest Ice Road opened on January 18th, 2021.
It was 37 miles or 60 kilometers long, with most of it going over the American side of
Lake of the Woods, whose winter surface is about 20 inches or 50 centimeters of star-spangled
ice, before reaching the woods of the woods.
No border crossings necessary.
But driving this ice highway didn’t come cheap, because making this ice highway didn’t
come cheap.
By one estimate, the road cost the people who made it $1,500 per mile or $1,000 per
kilometer in upkeep.
For starters, they had to place road markers so drivers wouldn’t veer off into the white
abyss and find themselves in, well, another white abyss.
Then there’s the plowing, which is always complicated, and then there’s the issue
of pressure ridges.
Changes in outside temperature stress out frozen lake ice, and like so many of us, it
cracks under the pressure.
The result is ice that needs to be flattened and plowed, but that’s also unstable enough
that it needs to be bridged so cars can safely cross.
And like all cool problems, pressure ridges form quickly and unpredictably, so a big part
of managing an ice road is picking out and planking over them.
In the ice road’s first year, it was the only way to get to the Angle in your own car.
And even though you could technically go through Canada the second year, getting a hundred-plus
dollar negative PCR test for every person in your car within 72 hours of crossing the
border isn’t as cheap, convenient, or rad as ripping it across a frozen lake for $250
total.
You could even get a season pass for just $500!
That’s less than a one-weekend pass to Coachella, and the ice fishing at Coachella is terrible.
After all, it’s no Tampalaustria.
For businesses on the Angle, the ice highway was a lifeline, and for walleye-loving travelers,
it was, I guess, a fishing line?
It was a very clever, very elaborate solution to a major, pandemic-imposed problem.
And it was a hit!
That is, until mother nature decided she had other plans and the road closed forever.
Now, if you want to drive to the Angle, you’ve gotta go through Canada, which is way less
cool, but at least gets you an hour of free healthcare.
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