Mille Lacs Lake

Mille Lacs Lake has been a center of Native life for thousands of years. It is the homeland of the Dakota people, whose name for this land, Mni Sota Makoce, gives the state its name and whose villages once stood along these shores. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Ojibwe, or Anishinaabe, moved into the region from the east, and Mille Lacs became a core Ojibwe homeland. The lake's abundance of fish, wild rice, and game made it a place people returned to season after season.

The Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe remains here today, one of the bands of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, with land and community around the lake. Their history includes the fur trade, a series of treaties, and the long struggle to keep their homeland and their treaty-guaranteed rights to fish and gather. The Mille Lacs Indian Museum, run in partnership with the Band, tells this story from the community's own perspective and is one of the most important cultural stops in central Minnesota.

Mille Lacs is one of the most famous walleye lakes in the country. Its broad, shallow, food-rich water grows big fish, and generations of anglers have come here in pursuit of them. In summer the lake fills with fishing boats working the reefs and mud flats; in winter it becomes a town of its own, with roads plowed across the ice and hundreds of ice-fishing houses set out over the walleye grounds.

The fishery is closely watched and carefully managed, shared under treaty between the state and the Ojibwe bands, and the rules can change from season to season to keep the walleye population healthy. That management is a modern chapter in a very old relationship between people and this lake. Beyond walleye, anglers pull northern pike, muskie, perch, and smallmouth bass from the water, and the fishing towns around the shore live and breathe the sport.

Mille Lacs is remarkably large and remarkably shallow, a combination that gives it its moods. On a calm morning it can lie flat and glassy to the horizon; on a windy afternoon it kicks up rolling waves that surprise people expecting a placid Minnesota lake. The lake was scooped and shaped by the last glaciers, which left it broad and shallow with a mostly rock and gravel bottom, ideal habitat for the fish and the birds that depend on it.

The towns around the shore, Garrison, Isle, Onamia, Wahkon, and others, are old resort communities built on fishing and summer visitors. A causeway and a highway follow much of the shore, with pull-offs and overlooks where the lake spreads out below the sky. At Garrison a giant walleye statue on the shore celebrates the lake's most famous resident and marks a favorite sunset spot.

The lake and its surrounding forest and wetland are rich with wildlife. Bald eagles and ospreys hunt the water, loons call across the bays, and pelicans and cormorants gather on the reefs. Spring and fall bring waterfowl migration along the flyway, and the surrounding woods hold white-tailed deer, black bear, and the occasional wolf and moose farther north.

Summer is the busy season of open-water fishing, boating, and lakeside resorts. Fall cools the air, turns the hardwoods gold and red, and quiets the shore. Winter transforms the lake entirely, freezing solid enough to support the ice-house village and the plowed roads out to the fishing grounds. Spring breaks the ice, returns the loons and eagles, and reopens the water for another season on one of Minnesota's great lakes.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.