Adventure Report: Lake Shetek State Park

It was a spontaneous decision: Let’s get away next weekend and rent a camper cabin. Roll the dice and see where we end up. Honestly, I didn’t have high hopes for this plan actually working. We were only a week out and with Martin Luther King Day in there, it seemed unlikely at best to find an open camper cabin, but Jen and I decided to give it a go. Normally, you can make camper cabin reservations online, but because of the complications with COVID and the need to schedule more time between guests for through cleaning and disinfecting, you currently have to call the DNR Reservations Hotline and speak to a live person.

It took a while for me and the friendly lady on the other side to go down the list of parks with me asking and her telling me the bad news, but I finally said “What about Lake Shetek?” The friendly voice on the other end fell silent. I heard the clicking of keys in the background. “Well”, she said after a pause and more clicking, “Looks like you got the last cabin in the whole state parks system.” Jen, who had been listening over speakerphone from the couch across the room did a fist pump and immediately whipped out her laptop to plot a route. Our lack of planning had been rewarded once again.

When the big day came, we crammed our things into the car, hung the fatbikes on the back and took off to southwestern Minnesota, where the grain elevators are large and the views are unimpeded. With just over 1,100 acres Lake Shetek State Park is a smaller park in Minnesota’s system, tucked into a corner of the state, some 40 miles from South Dakota and 20 miles from Iowa just outside of Currie in Murray County. In fact, the lake it’s named after is three times bigger. More about the park. The area had just been blasted by a blizzard the day before we arrived and the snow drifts grew higher and higher the closer we came.

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The Loon Island Causeway is a narrow land bridge that connects the state park to Loon Island with its roughly 1,000-foot span. Here, the ice cold winds were howling across the skinny trail and made our eyes water. Snowshoes were useless on this stretch, because there was not a flake of snow here, so we took them off and hurried across the bay. Just before we reached the island, however, it was like someone had turned off the wind tunnel machine. One minute we were leaning into the arctic blast, the next minute the wind had stopped completely as if on command. Not even the grasses next to us moved. I took a few steps back and there was the wind again, in full force. I remarked on this with a well thought out “Huh” and kept going.

The next day we got going a little earlier, planned for a longer trek on snowshoes and were looking forward to a high temperature of around 30 degrees. Leaving from our cabin again, we headed east this time, on Monument Trail. Snowmobiles had flattened out most of the drifts, so the going was a little easier this time around. The Lake Shetek Monument the trail is named after, marks the graves of 15 settlers who were killed by Dakota warriors in 1862. More about the US-Dakota war.

Here, we turned east to round the northern edge of Smith Lake, then north after getting on the Bluebird Trail. We fully expected to get a full blast of cold air on the Bluebird Trail since goes north through wide-open prairie and it was a windy day. As soon as we stepped on the trail, however, the sun broke out from behind grey clouds and the wind-still strong-turned out not to be a big deal as we soaked up the rays.

We stopped briefly to take in the views of Eastlick Marsh from a raised platform and headed back into the woods to take a break at the group camp area. My favorite part of winter trail breaks is the little stove I made from two beer cans with Youtube instructions. The whole kit, fuel, coffee, filter, stand and a windscreen packs into a little pot and within 10 minutes we had a pint of steaming, hot coffee. Paired with a granola bar and some beef jerky, it just doesn’t get any better.

We continued on the Park Lake Trail where we passed by the former site of a settler’s cabin, now just a depression in the frozen ground, and flushed out a herd of deer which scattered across Park Lake, some two dozen strong.

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After making the connection to Lake Side Trail on the other side of Park Lake, we shoed through a winter wonderland with deep snows, followed by another half mile of huge drifts and some of the biggest cottonwood trees we’ve ever seen. We turned back south on Fish Pond Trail (they raise Northerns here in two ponds) and from there bushwhacked our way past the Koch pioneer cabin back to our cabin. An hour later we had a fire going and enjoyed the last bit of daylight and mild temps. We watched the sun go down over Lake Shetek while the flames danced in the fire pit. As dusk came, the lights in the houses across the lake blinked on one by one while we enjoyed another quiet night in our own palace for rent.

We had big plans for Sunday. It was supposed to be a ride on the Casey Jones State Trail, which makes a six-mile loop from the park office through the nearby town of Currie. It turned out that the snowdrifts on parts of the trail were just too deep to make any kind of progress, so we decided to take a day off from exploring. We had been on most of the trails in the park, it was colder and windier and there was the matter of a three-hour drive home. After a hearty breakfast, we slowly packed up and said goodbye to Lake Shetek State Park. Next time we visit it’ll be in the summer and we’ll bring the road bikes, swim trunks and fishing poles.