Ice Road Reconnects Minnesota’s “Northwest Angle”
The ice road crosses Lake of the Woods, giving struggling resorts cut off from the rest of the country by the COVID-19 pandemic and Canadian travel restrictions a lifeline. KARE's Boyd Huppert reports.
(NBC News) — Paul and Karen Colson live 40 miles north of Warroad, Minnesota.
They may as well be on the moon.
“Cut off,” Paul says. “Totally, totally.”
For the past 10 months, the Minnesota husband and wife have been essentially severed from the rest of the United States.
That’s when Canada, seeking to slow the spread of COVID-19, closed its southern border to all but essential travel.
Roughly 40 miles away, a dozen resorts, and about 100 residents they support, lost the Canadian highway that provides the only access into Minnesota’s Northwest Angle.
Summer bookings evaporated at Jake’s Northwest Angle, the third-generation resort started by Paul’s grandfather.
Some resorts tried ferrying customers in by boat, but even that limited effort was rendered moot by colder weather.
Resort owners needed something bold. They now have it, in the form of a 22-mile ice road cut across frozen Lake of the Woods.
Read more here.
