Voyageurs National Park Trivia
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49 free Voyageurs National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Voyageurs National Park trivia quiz covers Minnesota's only national park, a maze of lakes and islands on the Canadian border where the interior can be reached only by boat in summer and by snowmobile, ski or snowshoe in winter. It ranges across Rainy, Kabetogama, Namakan and Sand Point lakes, the Kabetogama Peninsula, the Kettle Falls Hotel and dam, the Ellsworth Rock Gardens, and the wolves, moose, loons and walleye that live there. There is plenty of history too: the Ojibwe and the tribes before them, the French-Canadian voyageurs who paddled 90-pound fur bundles from Grand Portage to Lake Athabasca, the 1893 gold strike on Little American Island and the boom town it built, the logging and caviar industries, the resorts bought out when the park arrived in 1975, and its 2020 Dark Sky certification. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one, so it works for a houseboat game or a serious park-nerd challenge. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy it, try our Isle Royale, Boundary Waters and US National Parks quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Voyageurs National Park is in which U.S. state?
Minnesota
Minnesota's only national park is nearly 40 percent water, because Ice Age glaciers gouged hollows in the bedrock here and their meltwater filled them.
Q 02Which aviator publicly backed the 1960s campaign to create Voyageurs National Park?
Charles Lindbergh
Charles Lindbergh spent his last years as a conservationist. He endorsed the park proposal in 1969, helping to bring it national attention, and also campaigned to save whales.
Q 03Voyageurs National Park lies on the border with which Canadian province?
Ontario
Ontario: the border here follows the route the fur traders paddled, so it runs down the middle of three of the park's four big lakes rather than along a straight line.
Q 04Which president signed the 1971 law authorising Voyageurs National Park?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon signed it in January 1971, but the park could not be formally established until 1975, after state and local governments had donated the land they held inside its boundary.
Q 05Which animal 'island hops' around Voyageurs National Park, swimming out to campsites in search of food?
Black bear
Black bear: its sense of smell is keener than a dog's and open water is no barrier to it, which is why the park's campsites come with metal food lockers.
Q 06Which roadless peninsula makes up most of the land area of Voyageurs National Park?
Kabetogama
Kabetogama: its trails start at landings on the shore and cross it past small interior lakes, where the park keeps canoes for hikers to rent.
Q 07Which gateway city to Voyageurs calls itself the 'Icebox of the Nation'?
International Falls
International Falls has traded on its bitter winters for decades, and has had to defend its claim to the slogan against the mountain town of Fraser, Colorado.
Q 08Which is the largest lake in Voyageurs National Park?
Rainy Lake
Rainy Lake is so big that the park holds only its southeastern corner. Even so, its level is not natural: it has been regulated at the outlet, for the mills downstream, since the early 1900s.
Q 09Water leaving the lakes of Voyageurs National Park ends up where?
Hudson Bay
Hudson Bay: the park lies north of the Laurentian Divide, so its water flows west down the Rainy River and on toward the Arctic, while rain falling a little way south and east runs to Lake Superior.
Q 10In a voyageur canoe crew, what did the man called the gouvernail do?
Steered from the stern
Steered from the stern: with the avant guiding from the bow he took the canoe through the rapids, and the pair earned about twice the pay of the paddlers in the middle.
Q 11Which famous American canoe wilderness lies just east of Voyageurs National Park?
Boundary Waters
Boundary Waters: motorboats have been tightly restricted there since 1978, leaving most of it to paddlers, whereas on the big lakes of Voyageurs next door motors are welcome.
Q 12Which historic hotel is the only lodging inside Voyageurs National Park?
Kettle Falls
Kettle Falls: its first guests were the stonemasons building the dams beside it, followed by lumberjacks and fishermen. The Park Service bought it in 1976 and later restored it.
Q 13In 1918 the only hotel in today's Voyageurs park sold for $1,000 and what else?
Four barrels of whiskey
Q 21Which bird, the official bird of the park's home state, is a common sight on the lakes of Voyageurs?
Loon
Loon: unlike most birds it has solid bones, extra weight that helps it dive after fish. The park's home state has more of them than any other outside Alaska.
Q 22Voyageurs National Park holds international certification for the quality of what?
Its dark night skies
Its dark night skies: to keep the status it won in 2020 the park must go on protecting them from stray light and run stargazing programmes. On a clear night they show the Milky Way and sometimes the northern lights.
Q 23What do many visitors rent from companies just outside Voyageurs National Park to live on the lakes for days?
A houseboat
Four barrels of whiskey were part of the price, and fittingly so: the buyer, Robert Williams, was later charged with selling illegal liquor there.
Q 14Voyageurs National Park has one of the few spots in the lower 48 where a visitor does what?
Looks south into Canada
Looks south into Canada: at one portage between two of the big lakes the border twists so sharply that the Canadian shore lies on the south side of the channel.
Q 15Which animal's pelt was the great prize of the fur trade that the voyageurs served?
Beaver
Beaver: as trappers stripped the eastern forests of them, the trade had to reach ever farther into the northwest, which is what sent the canoe brigades through these border lakes.
Q 16What did prospectors find on a small island in what is now Voyageurs National Park in 1893?
Gold
Gold: the Little American Mine is thought to be the only gold mine in the state that ever turned a profit, but the other diggings yielded so little that the rush was over within five years.
Q 17Which boom town of the 1890s, in what is now Voyageurs National Park, was deserted by 1901?
Rainy Lake City
Rainy Lake City sprang up in 1894 with a bank, a school, a newspaper and several saloons. When the mines failed, the school and the paper closed and the town emptied; one saloon still stands.
Q 18What were the voyageurs' big freight canoes mainly built from?
Birch bark
Birch bark, stretched over a cedar frame and sealed with spruce resin. A 25-foot north canoe weighed only about 300 pounds, so two men could carry it across a portage.
Q 19Which product drew big commercial fishing companies to the waters of Voyageurs in the 1890s?
Sturgeon caviar
Sturgeon caviar: seven or eight companies were after the eggs of lake sturgeon by 1900, but the markets were far away and there was no refrigerated transport, so the big operators did not last.
Q 20Which animal is the dominant predator in Voyageurs National Park, preying mainly on white-tailed deer?
Wolf
Wolf: some 30 to 50 live in and around the park, and researchers track them by collar. When wolves vanished from the rest of the lower 48, this state's north woods were their last refuge.
A houseboat: the park sets aside marked shoreline sites for them, each with a fire ring and mooring posts, and lets two boats tie up overnight at each one.
Q 24Voyageurs is one of the few national parks in the lower 48 where visitors might meet which giant of the north woods?
Moose
Moose: about 40 to 50 live in the park, mostly on its big peninsula. While the state's herd has roughly halved since 2009, the park's has held steady.
Q 25Which people were the main residents of the border lakes around Voyageurs by 1780, supplying the fur traders?
Ojibwe
Ojibwe families kept the trade moving: they built the canoes the voyageurs paddled and sold them the smoked fish and other food they needed for the journey.
Q 26Which band lived in the Voyageurs area from the 1760s until the Nett Lake reservation was created?
Bois Forte
Bois Forte families stayed long after an 1866 treaty signed away two million acres of their homeland: they went on living here and harvesting its resources into the twentieth century.
Q 27Which vast glacial lake's retreat opened the Voyageurs area to its first people some 10,000 years ago?
Lake Agassiz
Lake Agassiz was once bigger than all the Great Lakes put together. When it drained away it left Lake Winnipeg and Lake of the Woods behind as remnants.
Q 28Voyageurs National Park sits on the southern edge of which ancient mass of bedrock?
Canadian Shield
Canadian Shield: rock some 2.8 billion years old, more than half the age of the Earth, lies bare at the surface here because Ice Age glaciers scraped away everything younger.
Q 29Which trees were the loggers of the early 1900s chiefly after in what is now Voyageurs National Park?
White and red pine
White and red pine: the lumber companies cut so thoroughly that by 1929 the big stands were gone, and trees that once dominated the forest are still only a minor part of it.
Q 30Hoist Bay in Voyageurs is named for what?
Machinery that lifted logs from the water
Machinery that lifted logs from the water: a hoist on a railway trestle swung floating logs onto train cars bound for the sawmill. The camp closed in 1929 once the big timber was gone, and the trestle pilings still stand.