Zippel Bay State Park

About this park

Zippel Bay State Park sits on the shore of Lake of the Woods, one of the largest lakes in the world, where visitors standing on the park's fine sand beach are still 80 miles from the lake's northern tip; the lake stretches 55 miles across at its widest point and plunges from just 4 feet deep in its southern bays to more than 150 feet in its northern reaches. Because of this sheer scale, Lake of the Woods behaves almost like an inland sea, freezing later than ordinary lakes, holding its ice well into spring, and shifting constantly between three-foot crashing waves, approaching storm fronts, and an eerie stillness broken only by the distant calls of thousands of gulls somewhere out over open water. The park's namesake, Wilhelm Zippel, settled on the point of land at the bay's entrance in 1887 as one of the area's first white settlers, and a small fishing village grew up around his homestead by 1909, though almost nothing of that settlement survives today. Long before Zippel's arrival, French explorer Pierre Gaultier de la Vérendrye passed through in 1732, reporting a region populated by Cree, Monsonis, Assiniboine, and Dakota peoples, and his nearby Fort St. Charles anchored seven decades of fur trade activity until the British claimed the region after the fort's 1763 abandonment. The state set aside the Zippel Bay area for public recreation in 1959, and today the 2,906-acre park's two-mile sand beach, boat marina, and stone jetty give visitors safe lake access alongside genuinely unusual wildlife-watching opportunities: nesting sandhill cranes, endangered piping plovers, and white pelicans share the shoreline with bald eagles, timber wolves, and the occasional moose, all set against the backdrop of the vast Red Lake Peatlands, among the last truly wild stretches of landscape remaining anywhere in Minnesota.