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As a child, Edward Murzyn remembers piling into his family's car to head Up North nearly every summer. A stop at Lake Itasca almost always made it into their road trip itinerary.
During their visits, Murzyn and his brother would race back and forth across the rocks that span the stream that flows out of the lake. The two even had matching Lake Itasca T-shirts.
Murzyn remembers learning early on that this small stream fed the mighty Mississippi River that rushed near his elementary school in northeast Minneapolis.
Recently while sifting through family photographs, Murzyn, now a Star Tribune reader in Fridley, began to wonder: Is Lake Itasca the true headwaters of the Mississippi River or can we trace it to another source?
That's the latest question for Curious Minnesota, our community-driven reporting project that invites readers into the newsroom to ask questions they want answered. Readers then vote on which query we should investigate — and Murzyn's was the winner of a recent round.
"There's two parts to the answer," said Connie Cox, the lead interpretive naturalist at Itasca State Park. "One is a cultural story. The other one is a science story."
The river's cultural story spans decades of exploration by travelers who followed the Mississippi north into Minnesota in search of its source.