The Surprisingly Humble Source Of The Mighty Mississippi

The headwaters of America’s most prolific river

(CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80382)

The Mississippi River winds its way across 2,340 miles of the American heartland. It is the second-longest river in the United States and has the largest watershed by far. The Mississippi watershed covers an enormous 1,260,000 square miles. At its widest point, the Mississippi River is eleven miles across in Lake Winnibigoshish. At its deepest point, the Mississippi is 200 feet deep, near New Orleans. The Mississippi River and its tributaries drains into portions of 32 US states and two Canadian provinces.

For such a mighty river (one of the mightiest and well-known in the world) you would think that it would have an equally mighty source. But that is not the case. Surprisingly, the Mississippi River orinates in an unremarkable lake in Minnesota. If you didn’t know that this lake, Lake Itasca, was the headwaters of the Mississippi, you likely glance twice at it.

Lake Itasca is just 1.8 square miles in area (470 hectares; 1,200 acres) and is located in a meager Minnesota state park. It is a glacial lake fed by a number of tributaries that flow into it at all times of the year. The lake is not large or remarkable in any way.

The lake has an average depth of 20 to 35 feet and sits at an elevation of 1,475 feet. That is not particularly deep or particularly high. For example, the Yarlung Zangbo River’s headwaters originates at an elevation of 20,000 feet from a glacier in Tibet. By comparison, Lake Itasca seems meager and mild.

(By GK20 — Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=85189883)

The headwaters of the Mississippi are so unremarkable in fact that an effort was made to make them more formidable and pleasing to look at. The channel out of the lake was widened and flattened so that tourists could see the flow of the water more readily. A series of rocks were also placed in the channel so that tourists can walk across the Mississippi River, a feat only doable in a select few locations over thousands of miles.

Technically, the tributaries that flow into Lake Itasca would be considered the actual scientific headwaters of…