Description

Travel with Bennett-Watt and discover the Itasca State Park in Minnesota where you can see the origins of the Mississippi River, the local wildlife and the Douglas Lodge Hotel.

Transcript

Visit the Itasca State Park in Minnesota Jim Watt: Itasca State Park is Minnesota’s first state park and befitting a First Lady. It’s arguably the states finest. Organized around Lake Itasca the head waters of the mighty Mississippi River, the Mississippi begins its 2500 mile journey south by flowing north. Matt Bahar: Many people think rivers flow south immediately from their source but the Mississippi actually goes north for about actually 120 river miles up to Lake Bemidji. And this is the official headwaters of the Mississippi River. It was officially discovered in 1832 by Henry Schoolcraft. The kind of ritual passage here is crossing the headwaters on the rocks sort of reject there and you can’t come to Itasca without doing that. So here in the park of Itasca it’s estimated about a half a million people coming here or 500,000 people every summer. They’ll go right to the headwaters. It’s a kind of crown jewel of the park. They also visit Douglas Lodge which is over a hundred years old. That was built in 1905 and you can rent a room there for the night. There’s also a small restaurant there. So the headwaters in Douglas Lodge are there number one and two attractions here. State Flower in Minnesota is the showy lady slipper. They actually grow underground for about 15 years and they have to grow for another 10 years above ground before they even bloom or flowers so that they can live to be up to a hundred years old. That’s one of our proud claims to fame here at Itasca is the showy lady slippers. Jim Watt: Not far from Itasca State Park in the midst of Lake Country on highway 11 the community of Dorset. Kathy Schmidt: There’s four grounds on and by eight other type of fat so we like to proclaim ourselves as the restaurant and the capital of the world is the fact that there is more restaurant here than anywhere else per capita. We have a population of 22 people with four restaurants. We have a fireplace that is of Italian and breakfast then we have a pizza in place that has pizza, an old fashioned ice cream soda crackers and this is beautiful. Mexican restaurant they serve a full meal there, the biggest restaurant in town and it’s really, really nice place and next door is the door to café and they can have choice of roasted chicken and steaks. Most of the restaurants are only open half this season. Our customers are from all over the place and I think they like this all and they have a lot of fun here. Dorset, is the restaurant capital of the world.