The Mesabi Trail Is Finally Complete — Minnesota, 2026

In September 2026, after more than three decades of planning, fundraising and construction, northern Minnesota's Mesabi Trail was declared finished. The paved route now runs 165 miles without a gap, from Grand Rapids in the west to Ely at the edge of the Boundary Waters in the east, linking twenty-eight communities along the way. The last piece to fall into place was the section between Embarrass and Tower, and with it the Mesabi became the longest paved trail in Minnesota and one of the longest in the country. Much of it follows abandoned railroad grade — the old ore lines that once hauled iron out of the range.

The trail takes its name from the Mesabi Range, the iron formation that supplied the American steel industry and fed wartime production. That history is not just a label: many of the shaded hills and wooded curves cyclists ride through are made ground, heaped up decades ago from mine overburden and since grown back over with forest. Interpretive signs along the route mark mining sites and the towns that grew around them. Funding came in part from the Department of Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation, a state agency that channels revenue from the mines back into the region — which makes the trail, in a fairly literal sense, the range paying forward its own landscape.

The photograph is a stretch of the trail in autumn near Calumet, on the western end of the range, with the pavement curving away between fence lines and full fall colour on both sides. It is a good jigsaw for the same reason it is a good ride: one strong line down the middle and chaos on either side. The path and the two runs of chain-link fence give you an unmistakable spine to build first, and the cloud-streaked sky drops in as a second anchor at the top. The foliage is the work — yellow, rust, orange and green mixed at every scale — so sort it by colour block and by which side of the trail it sits on, and close in toward the treeline last.