Frontenac State Park, Minnesota: A Very Brief Review

“I have graduated from reviewing games, and I will now review nature. You cannot stop me.”

Yeah, yeah, I know I’ve got some friends and family waiting on part two of my trip to Glacier National Park, but thing of this as a gift to myself in celebration of surviving 200 blog posts on this insane website. I’ve been busy and/or unproductive this weekend so I’m taking a break this week! Again! Because writing last week’s blog was not a break in any shape or form!

Anyway, I had quite a rejuvenating day this past weekend hiking around and experiencing nature in Minnesota’s Frontenac State Park, a wide-enough, I guess, strip of land conserving bluffs and prairies along the Mississippi river in Frontenac, Minnesota. I was actually there to meet up with friends from college, Kenny and Eva, who had traveled north from their home in Georgia to visit some of Eva’s family. The fact that the day was pleasantly spent not just with good company but also in nature is a definite plus, and it helped me unwind a bit after a weekend of working (there it is again! the reason I’m late on this stuff! Work! Work! Work!)

Minnesota has a few national parks (that I have not been to) and a robust collection of 75 (give or take) state parks. And of them, Frontenac State Park is, overall, a 3.5 out of 5 stars kind of state park, if you know what I mean. It has pretty splendid positive qualities, but it’s brought down by some kind of “meh” other qualities. It is the 13th Minnesota State Park I have been to, and I do travel to regional/state/national parks quite a lot so, despite only living here (in Minnesota, not on Earth) for a year, I do have a rough baseline for this kind of thing. And yes, I am a part of the Minnesota state parks hiking and passport club.

If you’re familiar at all with Minnesota’s geography, obviously the best state parks exist along Lake Superior’s north shore. Those are parks like Gooseberry Falls, or Tettegouche, or Bear Head Lake if you get a bit inland. The craggy, difficult terrain makes for some stunning views, and the wilderness up there is in significantly better ecological shape than more urbanized areas. Which maybe feels a bit unfair. If I were to compare something like “Assbutt Regional Park in A Random Farmer’s Field, MN” (not a real park) to something like The Fucking North Shore of Lake Superior, yeah, Assbutt park and its shitty little lake get a one star. But I am trying to have a weighted rating system, judging parks fairly on their merits and what they can be with what they have, not what they could be if they were somewhere else.

But that being said, the southeastern part of Minnesota has some surprisingly pretty areas. The bluffs along the Mississippi river, carved the volatility of glacial erosion and massive floods, combined with parks existing in the criminally understated Driftless region, make for some sleeper hits of hiking opportunities. There are sections of trail that are, like 250 feet of elevation gain in, like an eighth of a mile! That’s some good shit! The trails meander through several ecosystems, visiting rocky bluffs, the banks of the Mississippi, ephemeral stream valleys, tallgrass prairie, oak savannah, and probably some wetlands along the lakelet (fake word, who the hell decided they could call it that) in the southern part of the park. It has variety! It has biodiversity! It has trails that are in a distressingly unkempt shape!

See, for what it is, which is a random, unplanned hunk of land that the state was gifted by some wealthy white dude in the 1950’s, Frontenac would be an easy 4 or 4.5 stars kind of state park if it wasn’t for some of the frightening trail maintenance. There was nothing that was obviously a clear and present danger to myself or established hikers, and they had warnings for the challenging trails, but this was stuff that, if it were raining and I weren’t careful, it would be damn easy to fall and break a leg or something. Which is fine; difficult trails are part of the fun of hiking. But this is southern Minnesota, not the Rockies. To me, these rough trails don’t send the message of “this mountain does not care whether you live or die,” they send the message of “the state can’t afford to pay us enough for twail maintenance uwu” and that knocks off a few points in my book.

Sorry, is it not fair to judge a state park based on the failings of the government? Maybe, but I don’t care. I want nicer trails, damnit! Every state DNR or equivalent has this fucking problem because when funding gets cut, schools and conservation are some of the first to go (which is a fucking nightmare if you care at all), and yet regional park districts seem to manage it fine! But maybe that is, again, comparing apples to oranges. But it wasn’t just the trails that docks a few points from Frontenac: the prairie and oak savannah areas are, while nice, not very high-quality ecosystems. There were lots wood nettles, brambles, goldenrods, and other generalist plant species that tend to take over in imbalanced environments. Which, you know, is still better than being throttled by buckthorn or invasive species, but it isn’t the *best* example of these ecosystems I’ve been to, you know? That all, combined with some nice campgrounds but lack of other notable facilities makes it hard to give it a four on my arbitrary rating scale.

But criticisizing things is easier than being constructive, so let’s talk about the positives instead! I think I’ve been negative for enough time already. The best thing that Frontenac has going for it is the view, and the view from the Eagle Point Lookout, which is on the state Hiking Club trail, is pretty stellar. By the way, insider trading tip of the day, if you’re in a rush to explore a state park or just want to do something without having to think about what you want to do or why you want to do it, hiking the Hiking Club trail is always a solid option. They’re usually short-ish, easy-ish, and offer a “top-rated” selection of what the park has to offer. It’s like a highlight reel for the park. In Frontenac’s case, the hiking club trail hits a pretty solid overlook right at the parking lot, skirts along the bluffs, then spends a lot of time in the prairie and oak savannah parts of the park before meandering up to what I can only assume is one of the highest points in the park, Eagle Point Overlook. From up there, you can see down the Mississippi river probably a good fifteen (? I have no sense of scale ?) miles and get a panoramic view of the river, the bluffs across the river, and whatever trees happen to be nearby. We also were treated to a show of a turkey vulture feeding its teenage son, so that was a pleasant surprise, too.

We did see one quantumly-positioned bald eagle. I say “quantumly-positioned” because more than one of us could never determine its location or velocity at a time. Did Kenny see an eagle, or a vulture really far away? Did I see that same eagle, or was it a hawk with a stupid hairdo? Did Eva ever see the eagle, or was she too fast for us to catch up to her the entire time? Like an electron or a lollipop, the world will never know.

Honestly, we didn’t even get to half the park. There were a handful of other trails that went more into the prairie than we did, leaving the oak savannah area entirely, but we were leisurely and spent a good deal of time just chatting up at the top of the bluffs. Which was fine by me; it does say something about a park when the views are pleasant enough that you can sit in the damn parking lot and be content with your immersion in nature, even if you can still hear the train across the river. And there were a good half dozen other places along the trail that we could have just as easily sat at and eaten lunch or chatted about movies or whatever, because the overlooks along the bluffs are numerous. Even if most of the park isn’t actually on the bluffs, they do kind of dominate my memories of the park because, well, it’s pretty and all but the two-hundred-foot drop is a tad more impressive than a mediocre prairie. Sorry, prairie. I still love you.

As we near the end, I’d like to admit that it feels a bit… what’s the word I’m looking for here? Hypocritical? Insensitive? Backstabbing? Conflict of Interest? Foolish? for me to rate and review a chunk of land based off of my own experiences with the park and with other parks, mainly considering that I work for a park system. It sounds a bit fishy, like “Heh, your parks stink, come to my parks instead!” It isn’t a contest, of course; I think everyone should visit every park, every day, all the time. But I may be a bit biased in these things, either way, so take all this with a grain of salt. In fact, take anything I say with a grain of salt. I am basically a goblin, like a Rumpelstilskin but for shitty internet hot takes, and anything I say is liable to be full of half-truths and exaggerations, anyway.

But that’s Frontenac State Park in brief, anyway! I liked it well enough, considering it was more of a vessel for catching up with old friends, anyway. For being in a part of the state I previously assumed was just Corn: The Musical, it definitely has a way of making an impression. And then dropping the ball on that impression.

I give Frontenac State Park a slightly-to-the-right-of-the-middle-of-the-road 3.5 stars out of 5. Because the stars are made up and the rules don’t matter.