Gunflint Lodge, a classic Minnesota getaway, marks 100 years on the trail

It’s one of the longest drives a city dweller can make and still be in Minnesota. First, four hours up the interstate and along the rugged North Shore, deep into the Arrowhead. At Grand Marais, you abruptly make a jagged, thousand-foot ascent. You hew west onto smooth, straight pavement that tunnels through dense boreal forest and past slivers of glacial lakes.

This is the Gunflint Trail.

Deep in the Superior National Forest, across a continental divide and past a smattering of fishing resorts and boat launches for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a right turn onto gravel at about mile 43 takes you to the Gunflint Lodge.

It was started in 1925 by Chicago natives Dora and Russell Blankenburg as a rustic fishing and hunting outpost on the south shore of Gunflint Lake, along a chain of waterways that form an unassuming international border. One mile across the pristine lake, looking wholly undiscovered but close enough to touch: Canada.

One century later, that view is about the same, but Gunflint Lodge is bigger — and one of a shrinking number of classic Minnesota wilderness resorts. Many guests still come to fish and hunt. Many use it as a launching point for multi- or single-day paddling trips into the million-acre BWCA. Some just come to relax.

After checking in at the lodge, my family of three descended an outdoor staircase to Cabin 19, a green-painted A-frame bunker built into the lakeside slope. Inside, the cabin doesn’t take me back to the 1920s so much as the low-frills Minnesota lake resorts of the ’80s: wood-paneled everything, mismatched furniture, and everything my extended family would have needed for days of fishing and swimming and evenings of cooking and dining on the day’s catch, topped off with endless rounds of Uno.

There’s a short footpath to the lakeshore, where a pair of Adirondack chairs sit on a wooden platform and the midsummer sun was just thinking about setting over two countries. Sitting deep in one chair, our 2½-year-old daughter was so enchanted by the scene that we swear she uttered the words: “The whole world’s a sunset.”

Today, a guest could greet each day with a different activity. You could go hiking, boating, or stay back at the beach and playground with the kids. An extensive zipline course was introduced in 2012. Snowmobiling, cross-country skiing, fat biking and ice skating prevail in the winter.

The Blankenburgs decided to sell after only two years, handing the Gunflint Lodge over to Chicago friend Mae Spunner. She arrived in 1929 with daughter Justine, an aspiring medical student who quickly fell in love with the North Woods. As the Depression settled in, the Spunners relocated permanently from Chicago to Gunflint. In 1934 Justine married Bill Kerfoot, a onetime lodge guest from St. Paul.

In June 1953, when a fire destroyed the main lodge building, Justine directed the construction of an all-new headquarters. The completed lodge forms the core of today’s resort, with the reception desk, gift shop and Justine’s Restaurant, a cozy pine-framed dining room with big windows and a patio overlooking Gunflint Lake.

Eventually, a second generation of Kerfoots took over, expanding and modernizing the resort. Gunflint’s roster of 35 cabins (26 year-round, and nine summer camper cabins) is a hodgepodge of eras and updates, but all pay tribute to the wilderness, clad in that same green camouflage paneling. In any given cabin, you might find tables and chairs fashioned from logs and branches by Justine herself.

Justine died in 2001 at age 94. And by the 2010s, the next generation, Bruce and Sue Kerfoot, decided to retire. Enter John and Mindy Fredrikson, who had respectively worked in telecom in the Twin Cities and as a lawyer for Delta Air Lines. Completely new to hospitality, the spouses jumped at the opportunity to own such an iconic destination.

That means no drastic changes — the lodge and cabins still retain their modest character — but preservation of the Kerfoots’ legacy and some sensible modifications. Some acreage and neighboring cabins have been annexed. One feature that definitely didn’t exist in 1925: ziplining. The Towering Pines Canopy Tour provides adventurers with two hours of panoramic pinetop views. Meanwhile, in the winter of 2024-25, John got the idea to groom a 6-mile network of ice-skating trails on the Gunflint Lake ice. It drew national attention.

My first visit to Gunflint was in the early thaw of 2021. I was impressed with the views and expansive grounds, with a backcountry promising days of exploration. Beyond the resort buildings, there are miles of hiking, ski, snowmobiling and dogsled trails that link up with the national forest. One out-and-back trail winds through wetlands and woods to perhaps the resort’s most beautiful sight: the fairy-tale, teardrop-shaped Lonely Lake. Elsewhere, steep little peaks and cliffs with impressive vistas seem to come out of nowhere — terrain that also happens to make for some nice, stealthy ziplining runs.

One evening last month, the Fredriksons invited my family aboard one of the resort’s rental pontoons for a spontaneous sunset dinner cruise, packing entrees from Justine’s. We motored through a narrow channel to Magnetic Lake, with few visual hints that we were straddling an international border. We circled tiny Gallagher Island, dominated by a 1920s Swiss-chalet-style cabin. John Fredrikson told a story of original owner Ben Gallagher’s partying days, which somehow involved a beaver in a hotel bathtub in Duluth. Moments later, we spotted an actual beaver shuffling off the rocky shore.

On the way back to the resort, John and Mindy — who raised a teenage son at Gunflint and are now expectant grandparents — helped my 2-year-old, Petra, briefly take the helm of the slow pontoon. “Toddler of the Boundary Waters,” I remarked.

As for the original Woman of the Boundary Waters, in May 2022 yet another fire claimed Justine’s Cabin, her historic home in the center of the resort. The loss was a blow to both the surviving Kerfoots and the new owners. The Fredriksons responded smartly — as Justine might have — by building the two-story, seven-room Northern Lights Lodge on the site. It was the couple’s first-ever foray into new construction, and the resort’s first hotel-style rooms.

Downstairs is a snug, 50-capacity wedding and event center. The new fireplace is constructed partly of stones from Justine’s Cabin. A quote from one of her books adorns the mantel, reminding resort guests why we’re here in the first place.

“I stood on the shore of Gunflint Lake beneath a great white pine — matriarch of a fast vanishing tribe,” Justine wrote.