If you’ve ever spent time planning a milestone birthday party, and then found out you don’t have the resources to truly celebrate, you might understand what’s happening at Minnesota’s lone national park in 2025.
Voyageurs National Park, the 218,000-acre expanse of water and wilderness on the Canadian border just east of International Falls, turns 50 this year. And the gala celebration planned by the park’s myriad fans has been tempered just a bit by the announcement earlier this year of sweeping budget cuts all across the National Park Service.
According to some reports, the budget reductions announced in February by Elon Musk and his controversial Department of Government Efficiency have left as many as 10 park staff positions vacant at Voyageurs. The park opened in 1975 amid fanfare and some controversy, as some long-time property owners in the area were pressured to sell their lake cabins to the NPS.
But none of that potential bad news, or a spring cloudburst, could dampen the recent celebration of the park’s 50th birthday held at a Minneapolis brewery by the Voyageurs Conservancy – which was founded a decade before the park opened, and works to connect more people to Voyageurs.
Hundreds braved a sudden late May rain and turned out for the celebration, which featured information about Voyageurs, food, live music and a silent auction to raise money for the conservancy’s efforts.
“Everyone loves a birthday, and we’re birthdaying the hell out of the birthday. We’re doing it all year long. It’s not just one day, it’s a full year of activities,” said Christina Hausman Rhode, the conservancy’s executive director. “We’ve had a couple of bumps in the road with federal changes. We’ve lost staff and there’s some uncertainty there, but through it all this is an important moment to celebrate the park, to be thinking about the future and to be thinking about the vision for the national park in our state.”
The park welcomes upwards of 200,000 visitors per year, with a notable uptick during the pandemic, when more people were seeking outdoor recreation. Those numbers put Voyageurs somewhere in the middle, attendance-wise, among the country’s 63 national parks, far below the 12 million visitors the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina saw in 2024, and well ahead of Gates of the Arctic National Park in Alaska, which saw just over 11,000 visitors last year. Isle Royale National Park, which is in Michigan but located just off the tip of Minnesota’s Arrowhead and is accessible only by boat or plane, recorded 28,800 visitors in 2024.
Hausman Rhode said that in a state like Minnesota that celebrates the outdoors from the wilderness of the Boundary Waters to the hiking trails of the Driftless area in the southeastern corner of the state, a surprising number of people aren’t aware that the state has a national park, and many have never been there. Collectively, the conservancy is working to change that.
“We are another part of that mosaic of wonderful public lands in our state,” she said. “I think Voyageurs kind of completes that mosaic, as it’s everything Minnesotans love. It’s the big lakes, it’s the boats, it’s the loons, it’s the wolves. And we put it in a national park, and it’s our gift to the rest of the National Park Service.”
In addition to opportunities to view wildlife up close and camp in secluded sites specially designed so you don’t see neighboring campers, Voyageurs sells itself as a Dark Sky Park, popular for stargazers for the lack of light pollution and the opportunity to see a vast cosmic array and even northern lights on clear nights. While fishing, camping and boating have always been staples for Voyageurs visitors, Hausman Rhode said houseboating and sea kayaking are among the activities seeing a recent spike in popularity at the park.
The DOGE cuts have touched off a backlash from coast to coast, with a group called More Perfect Union erecting billboards in Minnesota and Wisconsin noting that the Trump administration’s funding reductions could mean reduced staff and increased danger for park visitors in 2025.
“We are down some staff positions and the next proposed federal budget is looking really grim for the National Park Service,” Hausman Rhode said. “We don’t know totally how that will filter down to the National Park Service, but we know cuts are being proposed.”
The park has visitors centers at Rainy Lake, Kabetogema Lake and Ash River, all of which can be reached from the Twin Cities in under five hours of driving. The park does not require an entry fee, although there are separate charges for camping, houseboat permits, boat tours and on-site equipment rentals. More information about the Voyageurs Conservancy and their efforts can be found at voyageurs.org.
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