Explore a National Park You’ve Never Heard of: Voyageurs National Park

Family travelers who love nature and the outdoors should add America’s least-visited national park to their travel wish list. In far northern Minnesota (some of the lakes extend into Ontario, Canada), Voyageurs National Park is a vast wilderness of crystal lakes and thick forests, with more than 900 islands.

You can explore by land and water from a base at a campsite or your own boat or rented houseboat. Along with the larger lakes where you can use your own boat are remote backcountry lakes where you can only use watercraft rented from the park. This is to avoid contaminating the pristine water with invasive aquatic plants.

It’s easy to rent a canoe, motorized runabout or a houseboat, or you can use a water taxi to take you to and from your campsite. Once there, you can use the park’s canoes to glide beneath the granite cliffs or access trails to discover some of the more than 400 species of wildflowers.

Canoeing on these lakes lets kids imagine themselves as the Ojibway, who lived on these shores long before the French-Canadian traders, called Voyageurs, came in their big canoes to trade for furs. And apart from the other watercraft, the lakes look much as they did when the Ojibway fished here in the 1600s.

So, too, does the night sky, where you’ll see more stars and planets than you knew existed. Voyageurs has been named an International Dark Sky Park, recognizing its almost total absence of artificial light in the sky. There’s no better place to get your kids excited about stargazing, and the park offers night sky programs.

August is prime season for meteor showers, and Voyageur National Park is one of the top places in the country to see the Aurora Borealis. Although Northern Lights are more frequent in the winter, you might be lucky enough to see them here in the summer or fall.