Voyageurs National Park: A visit to Kettle Falls Hotel

Posted on by snukes

After all the (self-inflicted) stress and tears of planning this trip to America’s most Canada-adjacent National Park, the adventure itself went off entirely without a hitch, and it was a gorgeous, only slightly painful adventure. In this first installment, we make our way successfully to Kettle Falls.

A vertical photo with the dark surface of a lake filling the bottom half, a evergreen tree-lined shore in the background, and a turquoise sky with a few grey clouds above. A wooden dock juts into the lake from the left side of the frame. A green canoe is tied to the corner of the dock. The sunlight hitting the dock, canoe, and trees is very warm and orange, implying sunrise or sunset.
Please start by enjoying one of Dustin’s gorgeous photos.

Or maybe one hitch? The night we spent camped at the Ash River State Campground immediately adjacent to the pit toilet in the rain ahead of our first night in the park wasn’t the awesomest, but I digress.

The fist day of our adventure was built around a reservation to spend the night at the Kettle Falls Hotel a (literal) backwater hotel located a 12-mile boat-ride from the Ash River Visitor Center on a little hook of land that manages to be the only place in the continental US where you can look out the window and see Canada to the south.

A Google Maps image showing Voyageurs National Park in the center, surrounded by three large lakes. On the far eastern side of the park, a pin marks the location of Kettle Falls Hotel. It is located just above the black line marking the US border where it curves around in a backward S-shape creating a small peninsula of US land north of Canada.
The black line is the US/Canada border. The pink dot shows the location of the Ash River Visitor Center. Map from Google.

Kettle Falls Hotel sends a daily shuttle to the mainland to collect and return visitors, and to pick up supplies. The shuttle arrives at 11am, and we arrived plenty early to make sure our bags were adequately packed for a boating-hiking-canoeing-camping-s’mores-eating adventure. (Basically, we packed to go camping. If I did it again, I’d pack more stuff because we didn’t have to hike wearing our big packs at all, because CANOES.)

At 10:45, we shuffled down to the dock and found our chariot awaiting, looking just as scruffy and perfect as I’d hoped.

A boat labeled "Kettle Falls Hotel" and in need of a new paint job is tied up next to a wooden dock. A man in suspenders and a blue hat stands at the back of the boat, facing the camera. Laura stands to his right, obscured by the shadow of the part of the boat that's covered.
Laura and the boat pilot (who also happens to own the entire Kettle Falls concession, but whose name I will not share because when he saw Dustin taking photos he said, “you can’t take pictures of me, I’m on the lam!” I liked him immediately.)

Two other guests, both retired women, and an employee joined us for the ride to the hotel.

Laura sits on a bench at the back of a boat, one arm resting on the boat's side. The motor is visible to the left, and the wake of its speed can be seen fanning out in the water behind the boat. The sky is overcast, but Laura is lit by sun. She wears her pink hat and looks off to the side, a half-smile on her face.
This is the relaxed pose of someone who made successful plans and now gets to enjoy them.

The late-September air was crisp but pleasant enough, even with the wind of the boat’s speed blowing on us. Our boat pilot assured us that the ride to the hotel would take us through all the most scenic parts of the park, so we’d obviously made the best decision to stay there.

The three big lakes of these boundary waters were formed by the arrival and retreat of several enormous glaciers over the igneous and metamorphic rocks of the Canadian Shield formation. The result is islands that barely rise above the level of the water, and lakes that have no great depths.

A small island fills the center of the horizontal photo. At its base, some rocks can be seen along the shore, but tall evergreen trees appear to fill ever square foot of the surface. The lake around it is very blue, and the sky above appears hazy. Warm orange sunlight highlights the trees.
Some of the 500+ tree-covered islands almost appear to just be clumps of trees growing straight out of the lake.

Timber harvesting in the previous century removed all the old growth trees. The second-growth forests here are on the southern border of the Canadian boreal forest (a forest of primarily cold-hardy coniferous trees) where it means up with the hardwood forests of northern Minnesota, resulting in a gorgeous mix of evergreens and deciduous trees whose leaves, here at the end of September, are just starting to change color.

In the foreground, at right, a small fire burns in a metal fire ring, though it is daytime. Cut logs are stacked to the ring's left. In the middle background, sumac bushes grow along the shore, green leaves starting to turn red. Behind them, the lake is visible. At a distance across the water you can see an opposite shore, lined with evergreen trees. The sky is blue with some gray clouds.
From the water, nearly all the trees appear evergreen, but as soon as we pulled up on land, we found sumac and maple and the mysterious American larch – the only deciduous pine tree.
Across a short distance of dark lake, the shore approaches. Trees grow along it, though not as thick as in other photos. One doc is visible on the right side of the photo, another on the left. The right dock has a small fishing boat tied up and several boxes piled on the dock. The left dock shows a tied up boat and then disappears out of the frame.

The docks at Kettle Falls were quite unassuming, available both for the hotel’s shuttle boats and for private boats. The hotel is not located right there, as I expected it to be, so we loaded into fancy golf carts and zoomed deeper into the forest to find our home for the evening.

A photo of the hotel taken at an angle so its front facade slopes away to the back left of the photo. It is a white wooden building with covered steps leading up to a covered porch. Several second-story windows have red and white awnings. A man approaches the steps along a gravel path.
An unassuming little hotel in the lovely middle of nowhere.

A closeup of the covered steps leading into the hotel. A sign is nailed across the top reading "KETTLE FALLS HOTEL" in painted red letters.

We checked in then settled into our second-floor room. Built between 1910 and 1913, the hotel originally offered 18 guest rooms, but after renovations in the 1980s to repair a seriously sagging foundation and update for accessibility and safety, the number of rooms dropped to 12. Three bathrooms are available for all guests to share.

Our room faced out from the front of the hotel, though the view was mostly obscured by the awning. Charming from the outside, just kinda in the way from the inside.

A photo of a small guest room. A double-bed is in the back right corner. A nightstand sits diagonally beside it (hard to tell if that's on purpose). On the wall across from the foot of the bed is an antique wooden wash stand with a large white basin and pitcher on top. A window with the shade pulled is between the bed and washstand on the back wall. The floor is wood plank, the walls are beige, and one piece of framed art, far too small, hangs on the wall above the bed.
Some rooms have single beds (as many as four), a few have doubles. All have the lovely wash stand with a pitcher and basin. All have really terrible art on the walls. Like… not just inoffensively bland, but so bland as to somehow become actually offensive. I’m sorry we didn’t get any close-up photos.

Then down to the little restaurant on the first floor to grab some calories and make a plan.

The plan was to explore our little corner of the peninsula. Namakan Lake, the lake south of us, was dammed in two places at the beginning of the 20th century, to assist loggers in their work. The water level only went up about 9 feet, but in such a shallow lake with such low-lying islands, the dams made a huge impact on the topography.

The dam with a viewing terrace above. This might be the smallest dam I’ve ever seen.
A selfie of Dustin (left) and Laura (right. Dustin smiles at the camera while Laura points at the trees behind her, making an, "oooh!" face. Her eyes are closed.
Selfie from the dam observation deck. I’m pointing at Canada. 🙂 I don’t think my eyes are closed on purpose.

We chatted with a ranger about invasive zebra mussels and spiny water fleas, watched a monster truck portage several boats from the Namakan side to the Rainy side, admired a house boat moored at a dock nearby, and scoped out locations for Dustin to try some astral photography later in the evening. By 2:00, we found ourselves somehow out of things to do.

“I didn’t expect that,” Dustin commented.

A lot of the area around Kettle Falls is marshy, which effectively cuts it off from overland access and trails. As with all other things in this park: if you want to explore, you’re gonna need a boat.

A boardwalk with wooden rails runs from the bottom of the photo toward the background, filling the right side of the frame. It runs through a marshy area with green undergrowth, water visible between the leaves, and tall spindly trees. Laura stands halfway down the boardwalk and appears to be swatting something away from her face.
A boardwalk crosses one of the marshes, leading mainly from the hotel to employee housing, but since we’d run out of normal tourist paths, we thought we’d try it. There were mosquitos.

And so we retired to the hotel for a bit of napping, followed by dinner, star-gazing, and a trip to the Tiltin’ Hilton, aka, the bar with a famously sloped floor. From descriptions I’d read, I expected a floor where your marbles would definitely roll into one corner, but the degree of slope on this floor is insane. You basically have to hike uphill from the door to the pool table. Alas, it doesn’t photograph as impressively as it presents in person. I recommend going to check it out.

It isn’t obviously how sloping the floor is in this photo, but everything that seems weird about the perspective can be blamed on it.

We spent a little time hanging out in the bar with a rowdy group of fishermen who were having a friends reunion. When they heard Dustin had been out taking photos of the stars, they demanded a slideshow.

And you do too? Thank you for your patience, here are some stars:

Stars are visible in a dark sky above a dark late bordered with completely black tree silhouettes. Center in the sky, a very bright star (actually Jupiter) glows.
The bright light you can see is Jupiter. In this September 20, 2022 photo, it was three days away from being at its nearest point to Earth in 60 years. It was so bright. I love how you can see its reflection in the water.
Vertical photo of the milkyway galaxy stretching up into a dark, starry sky above a distant skyline of tree silhouettes.
Just a little Milky Way over Rainy Lake.
The milkyway galaxy rises above a dark lake with a few orange lights available on what must be the shoreline.
Milky Way over Rainy Lake with the lights from someone’s lodge along the shore.

I kept thinking I was seeing things out of the corner of my eyes until suddenly I saw something out of the middle of my eyes: meteor! In fact, a proper meteor shower. While we were out (maybe an hour?) I saw 8 or 10 meteors slip across the sky. Probably also an alien spaceship or two. But definitely meteors.

As we walked back to the hotel in near perfect darkness, we continued to see strange spots in the dark, but now they were in the forest, not the sky. We finally managed to track one down, and found this guy:

Closeup photo of a black insect that appears to be made of segmented plates. Giant blades of grass near the insect provide scale showing it is a very small insect.

… who, it turns out, is a firefly larva! (I had to do a LOT of searching to convince Google this isn’t a potato bug or woodlouse.) Today I learned that firefly eggs hatch in the late summer. The larva will spend one or possibly two winters hunting slugs, snails, and worms, occasionally shedding its exoskeleton to grow bigger, and the finally pupating in the spring to turn into the firefly that will put on such a good show. The larvae bioluminesce, and are sometimes called glowworms.

After promising our new friends in the bar that we’d send them copies of the star photos, we headed to bed. Tomorrow: the Great Canoeing Adventure would begin!

The pictures are even better tomorrow. Please enjoy this preview. 🙂

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