Itasca Cabin Report

[dreamshark]

Two nights in Bear Paw Cabin #3, a stunningly historic CCC cabin in the heart of Itasca State Park. Itasca offers a bewildering variety of lodging options, but only the Bear Paw Campground has what I was looking for, and you have to book them well in advance. When I made the reservations a month ago this was the only one that still had two contiguous available nights, but it turned out to be a good choice. There are 6 cabins, three at the top of the hill and three more a little lower down and out of direct view. BP2 is only about 50 feet away and shares a parking area, so it is not exactly secluded, but our neighbors were not bothersome. The sturdy front porch looks away from the park driveway and out over Lake Itasca, which is very nice. However you can't see the lake at all due to the disturbingly out of control undergrowth beneath the towering pines. (More on that later and why I found it so disturbing.)  


The cabins themselves are magnificently built out of hand-hewn red pine logs and hunks of granite, but clumsily updated. You can't see the little kitchen to the left, but trust me, it is UGLY. Linoleum flooring tacked down with an aluminum strip, cheap wooden cabinets that somehow manage to clash with the lovingly refinished pine logs, and awkward use of space. The on-wall wiring is probably unavoidable, but surely they could have found a way to route the horizontal casing that would be less obtrusive? Maybe even used a color that wasn't glaring white? I appreciate having electricity and water, but it's a little sad that the updating wasn't done with the same loving attention to detail as the original construction, which has held up physically and aesthetically for 85 years and looks prepared to do so for another 85. 


Let's take a closer look at those walls, clearly hand-hewn with one of those heavy two-handed wood scrapers yet somehow fitted so closely together that they hardly needed chinking. Admittedly, you can't see the chinking here because someone laid little furring strips over it, but you can see from the outside how closely the logs fit together.


The Civilian Conservation Corps has been kind of a recurring theme through our State Park experiences so far this year, and Itasca really brings that history front and center. Itasca Park was here long before the Great Depression of course, but it was the site of the first and largest CCC camp in Minnesota and "the boys" did a tremendous amount of work here. Since we were sleeping inside their handiwork, I gravitated to that section of the interpretive center and now have a lot of random facts and factoids about the CCC rattling around in my head. Every state in the Union had some CCC presence, but Minnesota is in the top 3 for sheer numbers; well behind California, approximately tied with Oregon. Without the CCC and WPA, the state would have quite a different aspect, I think.