Lake Bronson State Park

Lake Bronson State Park

(the "second Itasca")

— Lake Bronson, MN —

One of the highlights of camping at Lake Bronson State Park is that when we got up in the morning we did not have far to go to get to our first geocache of the day.  Since we had time and we were already there, we did something different than the usual – we hiked the entire geocache at a leisurely pace and it was fun (normally due to time constraints we have to "cache-and-dash").

A few interesting facts about Lake Bronson.  This is also part of the Tall Grass Aspen Parkland Biome, so it looked fairly similar to Old Mill.  It is a huge park and was developed to be the equal of Lake Itasca (at the time calling it the "second Itasca") – much of this was done in the 1930s as part of the WPA (Works Progress Administration) – this means there were a lot of impressive stone buildings and great hiking trails (kind of like Gooseberry State Park).

The starting location for this multicache was right near the old water tower.  We spent some time looking around it when we read the clue, "Get a birds eye view," and figured out we need to climb the tower.

Old water tower

So up we went – did you notice that Marcus went geocaching in his jammies?

After searching high and low, we eventually low we found the next GPS location.

Marcus got back into his chariot, and we were off to the next spot.  It was a nice hike – we went past our campground and towards old camp Bronson.

It wasn't far until we spotted the second location. 

It was right next to a dock with a great view of the lake.  Lake Bronson is actually a man-made reservoir created when they put in the dam (and a very, very tall dam as far as Minnesota ones go!).

After grabbing those coordiantes we started walking towards the final location.  This was actually right near the enterance of Camp Bronson.  This is the place where the camp existed for the workers that were part of the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corp).  They were completing the WPA project of building Lake Bronson Park.  There was a trail with signs showing where all the buildings in the camp were located.

We eventually got to the spot where the Bronson Homestead one stood.  It had a big platform where one could look out onto the lake.  Hiding under the platform was the cache.

Marcus was pretty patient, but he really wants to get this "bock bock" card....

And here it is:

Just an example of a sign telling us about Poison Ivy!

Since we were so close we took some extra time to walk down and see the dam – Lake Bronson is actually a man-made reserve as already mentioned.

The full name of the state park is actually Lake Charles Bronson State Park.

"So, you thought your state park was tough."

... or maybe not.