Paul Bunyan Land

The star of the park is its enormous animated Paul Bunyan, a seated giant so large that his greeting can startle first-time visitors. As guests approach, Paul moves and speaks, and in a bit of showmanship that has delighted children for decades, he often calls out arriving kids by name, a trick that leaves the youngest visitors wide-eyed. It is a piece of classic roadside Americana, the giant folk hero brought to talking life.

This Paul has history. He long stood at an older amusement attraction in Brainerd, a fixture of Minnesota family vacations, and when that attraction closed the beloved statue was rescued and relocated to Paul Bunyan Land, where he continues his welcome. Paul Bunyan himself is a giant of North American folklore, the mythic lumberjack said to have shaped the land, and companion of Babe the Blue Ox, and he is a fitting mascot for this heavily forested, logging-rooted part of the state.

Paul Bunyan Land is an amusement park in the old, homegrown sense, family-scaled and unpretentious, with classic rides rather than towering steel coasters. That is much of its appeal: it is the kind of park where small children can ride nearly everything, where the pace is gentle, and where the whole family can enjoy a day without the crowds and expense of a mega-park.

The rides and attractions carry a nostalgic, midcentury feel, and the whole place has the character of a roadside attraction from an earlier era of American travel, lovingly kept going. For families vacationing in the Brainerd Lakes area, it has long been a favorite rainy-or-shine day out, a dependable slice of simple fun in the north woods.

Beyond the rides, Paul Bunyan Land includes Pioneer Village, a gathering of historic buildings collected from around the region and restored on the grounds. Visitors can wander through a schoolhouse, a general store, a church, a log home, and other structures that show how people lived in Minnesota's settlement and logging days. It is part outdoor museum, part step back in time, and it gives the park a depth beyond amusement.

This region's history is bound up with the north-woods logging boom, when the great pine forests of central and northern Minnesota were cut and floated down the rivers, and the Paul Bunyan legend grew out of that lumberjack world. Long before the loggers, this was and remains Ojibwe country; this is the homeland of the Anishinaabe, whose bands live across the region and whose name for the land helped give Minnesota its name. Pioneer Village tells the settler chapter of a much longer story.

Paul Bunyan Land sits in the Brainerd Lakes area, one of Minnesota's premier vacation regions, a country of hundreds of lakes, resorts, golf courses, and pine forest. The town of Brainerd itself has its own giant Paul Bunyan and Babe statues and a long history as a north-woods hub. A visit to the park fits naturally into a wider lake-country getaway of swimming, fishing, and cabin life.

The park is a warm-season destination, opening in spring and running through the summer and into fall, timed to the vacation season when the lakes are full of visitors. Summer is its busy heart, with long, warm days ideal for the outdoor park. Fall brings north-woods color to the surrounding forest and quieter days, while winter closes the park as the lake country turns to snow, ice fishing, and skiing until the next season.

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