Country Hiking at Whitetail Woods and Vermillion Highlands

Yesterday we got out early for our #travelnear hike, to try to beat the rainclouds and the crowd of people who have been getting out in nature lately. We brought raincoats to ensure it wouldn’t rain (it didn’t) and our dog Ozzie. We headed south to Dakota County’s newest regional park, Whitetail Woods.

Whitetail Woods is a 456-acre regional park right in the middle of Dakota County (think between Rosemount and Farmington and to the east). This is a very new park, in that it opened in 2014, with a land purchase from a single family. It’s rare for a new park to be created from scratch these days but the goal was to fill a need for the nearby residents.

Photos by Paul Crosby

The park features a sledding hill, an amphitheater, picnic shelter, and three kick-ass camper cabins. These modern treehouse camper cabins instantly booked for the year when they went online in 2014. I know, because I was trying to make a reservation the day it opened, but also many times since. Still haven’t stayed there – but we’ve been out to Whitetail a few times to explore. Kudos to my work colleague Steven Dwyer and HGA for designing these nationally-award winning cabins! Some day, we will stay there.

Back to the hike, the trails at Whitetail are currently greatly limited right now because of what looks like trail restoration. The large area around the Empire Lake was closed, so we were only able to walk on the southeast corner of the park and covering all at the trails we could, it was only a little over 2 miles.

Luckily, the Whitetail trails connect to adjacent Vermillion Highlands, a 2,822-acre research, recreation, and wildlife management area. This is adjacent to the land known as UMore Park, which has an interesting history of being a munitions facility called Gopher Ordnance Works, which produced smokeless gunpowder and related products to assist the WW2 efforts. In 1947, the land was transferred to the University of Minnesota.

We hiked the Lone Rock Trail and looped back to the Whitetail Woods parking lot. It was a total of 8 miles. This hike was a mixture of open roads adjacent to fields and prairie lands. It was the classic rural Minnesotan-feeling country hike. Gravel roads, farm fields, wetlands, wildflowers, areas of woods. We both remarked how this felt like places we grew, even we grew up in different parts of the state. Roxanne grew up in rural northwest Minnesota and Kevin grew up in Northfield. You can't help but break into John Denver's classic "Take me home, country roads...".

One important thing to know about this area is that you can expect to hear gunshots and shooting. To someone who lives in the city and has a dog that is absolutely gun shy, this really was not great. The Dakota County Gun Club is within the Vermillion Highlands area, so the loop path we took, brought us very near to the shooting. It wasn't constant but was pretty annoying and scared Ozzie so he was shaking and intent on getting out of there. We also saw two hunters in full camo gear and face paint returning to their vehicles. In looking this up later, we found it is spring turkey hunting season. It was a little strange to us to be going on a nature hike and have no warning of the fact there is hunting going on in the area and trap shooting. How about a sign letting people know? Perhaps the people in Dakota County just know this stuff?

Bottom line- If you have a hunting dog and these areas are close to where you live, you should check them out. If you live in the Twin Cities and are looking for a good destination hike, I would wait on this one until there are more open trails Whitetail Woods and definitely avoid if your dog doesn't like gunfire. Perhaps a winter weekend at one of the Whitetail camper cabins would be perfect, so look to reserve that now!

update: It’s a week later and we are still finding wood ticks on Ozzie. Found a few on ourselves as well. The paths we went in were largely grass paths (not gravel or dirt), thus it’s ripe for getting ticks. Be prepared!