Big Bog State Recreation Area

Big Bog State Recreation Area, a recent addition to the Minnesota state park system, is located on Minnesota State Highway 72, north of Waskish, Minnesota. It covers 9,459 acres (38.3 km²), primarily swamps, bogs, and upland "islands".

The park was started by local grassroots efforts in 2002, it became a state recreation area and officially opened in June 2006. Common trees include tamarack, tag alder, cedar, diamond willow, black and white spruce, jackpine, and ash and black ash with paper birch, "popple" or quaking aspen, white and red pines in the uplands. There are numerous rare plants, including carnivorous sundews and pitcher plants. Animals include bald eagles, wolves, black bears, white-tailed deer, and moose.

The "Big Bog" is composed mostly of wetlands and is larger than the state of Rhode Island. The name had shown up previously in maps, such as by the National Geographic Society. The greater Big Bog region stretches from jackpine forests north of Upper Red Lake in Beltrami County, Minnesota and Lake of the Woods County, Minnesota to the communities along U.S. Route 71 leading to International Falls (Mizpah, Margie, Indus, and Littlefork) in Koochiching County, Minnesota. It is also almost entirely unpopulated, except for the town of Waskish along Highway 72.

Read more about Big Bog State Recreation Area:  History, Bog Walk, Natural Landmark Designation

Famous quotes containing the words big, bog, state, recreation and/or area:

    One of the baseball-team owners approached me and said: “If you become baseball commissioner, you’re going to have to deal with 28 big egos,” and I said, “For me, that’s a 72% reduction.”
    George Mitchell (b. 1933)

    Our Bog is dood, our Bog is dood,
    They lisped in accents mild,
    But when I asked them to explain
    They grew a little wild.
    Stevie Smith (1902–1971)

    A functioning police state needs no police.
    William Burroughs (b. 1914)

    Media mystifications should not obfuscate a simple, perceivable fact; Black teenage girls do not create poverty by having babies. Quite the contrary, they have babies at such a young age precisely because they are poor—because they do not have the opportunity to acquire an education, because meaningful, well-paying jobs and creative forms of recreation are not accessible to them ... because safe, effective forms of contraception are not available to them.
    Angela Davis (b. 1944)

    During the Civil War the area became a refuge for service- dodging Texans, and gangs of bushwhackers, as they were called, hid in its fastnesses. Conscript details of the Confederate Army hunted the fugitives and occasional skirmishes resulted.
    —Administration in the State of Texa, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)