I was up in the Minneapolis area on a business trip that got extended over the weekend (like it or not). Having done all of the state highpoints within a day's drive, I decided to find some other worthy point of interest to visit on Saturday. The weather wasn't the best...cloudy and in the low 50s, but I drove out from under the rain in the Twin Cities and up to Lake Itasca, the source of the Mississippi River. Where the Mississippi exits the lake, there is a series of (human-placed) rocks across which you can hop to say you have "walked" across the Mississippi. A hundred feet or so downstream there is a log bridge if you're not quite so adventurous.

I shot this panorama from the log bridge. The small pan in the primary page requires Java to view. The larger pan linked to near the bottom of that page requires Quicktime and a bit of patience, since it's a 3-meg file.

I would argue that this is the highest point of the Mississippi river, so qualifies as some sort of goal...and, yes, I did hop across the rocks. There is another pan that I shot from partway out on the rocks but it'll require a bit more finagling to make it work right...it was kind of hard to maintain alignment when you're balancing on slick rocks and trying to hold the camera in the series of positions to shoot the pan.

(When we were on our upper-Midwest highpointing trip back in 1999, we never got that far west in Minnesota, so this was a good excuse to visit another noteworthy spot in the U.S.)

The water is a bit chilly this time of year, plus it was only in the lower 50s on Saturday when I was up there.

In addition to the panorama from the log bridge, I also shot another panorama perched on some of the rocks across the outlet to Lake Itasca. I think it would be safe to argue that this, or at least the water flowing over some of the barely-submerged rocks, qualifies as the highpoint of the Mississippi River.

The smaller pans that come up in the pages linked to in this post require Java to view. If you have Quicktime, the QTVR .mov files will show up in a larger (1024x768) window and will give a higher-resolution view, but they're big (2 to 3 meg) files, so be patient while they load.

Allen, thanks for taking the time for posting your lastest pan and tilt. I always injoy watching them. I will be going through that area in Sep on a highpointing trip and will now add "the hightest point of the Mississippi river" to my list of stops. Would never have thought of it without your post.

Ed H