GARDEN LAKE Traditional Cache
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(small)
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Located NE of Ely, MN on the Fernberg Trail. I WILL DELETE ANY SPOILERS (LOGS/PICTURES) THAT INDICATE WHERE THE CACHE IS LOCATED or of the CONTAINER. DO NOT LEAVE FOOD OR LIGHTERS IN THE CONTAINER. NOT Available During Winter because of snow depth and maybe no parking. BYOP
GARDEN LAKE
STATISTICS: Brown colored water (stained by the tannin from the bogs), median depth 18ft., and water clarity about 4 ft. You can fish from the pier: walleye, crappie, bluegill, pike, bass, perch) or rent a boat at one of the resorts and fish the lake. From this spot, to the right a couple of miles, you can enter the BWCAW.
GARDEN LAKE, once known as EVE LAKE, is to the right of the bridge. The water that you are looking at has traveled from deep within northern Lake County and part of St. Louis County in Minnesota. From here the water flows under the bridge, around a bend, and in about ¼ mile, descends over the hydroelectric dam, where it then flows into Fall and Basswood Lakes, into Rainy Lake in Canada, and finally empties into Hudson Bay. The water from here that enters the turbines at the dam provides electricity for most of the Vermilion and Mesabi Ranges (Ely area down through Virginia – Hibbing – to Grand Rapids).
GARDEN LAKE: Named because the Native Americans, and later, immigrants, had garden plots along the shore and sold their produce in town in the stores and house- to- house.
Imagine, this entire area, totally denuded of trees- that is what happened when the loggers were in the area at the end of the 1800’s and beginning of the 1900’s. The logs were floated on the rivers and lakes, and came through this narrowing and then over the falls to the sawmills.
There also was a sawmill on this lake (operating from 1918-1948), owned by Cy Fortier, a pioneer lumberman and developer of the area as early as the 1870s. He was the man, who at his own personal expense, built most of the roads and bridges east of here to supply his logging camps in the area, and although rebuilt through the years, he set their foundations. His lumber mill on GARDEN LAKE supplied lumber for many homes and resorts in the area. He employed many men from Ely. The hours were long and hard- 10 hours a day, six days a week same as the miners worked in the mines.
The prospectors also came through here in the 1800’s – tearing up the land, digging test pits- looking for minerals and ore.
I hoped you have enjoyed a bit of history and well as the beauty of the GARDEN LAKE AREA.
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