I was looking at the US-Canada border from International Falls, MN to Lake Superior just northeast of Grand Portage, MN and I got to wondering: How much of that border is over land? I know at least a small section must be, as the border crosses the watershed which separates the waterflows to the Arctic ocean on one side and the Great Lakes on the other, but I couldn’t quite tell just how many portages or land borders made up this twisty international boundary, especially as it wound its way through Voyageurs National Park.
Any good links to decent maps showing this particular boundary?
You can just go to Google maps and look at the satellite view of the border. You can blow it up and see the numerous lakes in detail, and there are a lot of little landbridges there.
The border up there is all lakes and river. A good chunk of that area is the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA), a 1.1 million acre wilderness area with awesome canoeing (portaging) fishing and camping. On the Canada side is Quetico Provincial Park, a similar but more rugged* 475,782 hectare (1.175 million acre) wilderness.
BWCA has iron fire grates and a plastic pit toilet at established camp sites. Quetico doesn’t.
As fixed by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty in 1842, the border is supposed to run
The “height of land” bolded above is the Height of Land Portage. If I’m not mistaken (and I may well be), this is the only land border between the U.S. and Canada between Quebec and Manitoba; all the rest is via rivers and lakes. Granted, there may be portages involved other than this one if you were to canoe up said rivers and lakes, but this is the one that crosses the watershed line.
Yeah, I’d found that article too, and thought maybe that was the only land border. But looking at Google Maps shows some other possible land border areas. Unfortunately their resolution failed me, and their plain map versions were equivocal too.
If you are looking for border trivia, there is a small chunk of land, a peninsula on Lake of the Woods, just east of Manitoba, that is actually US territory north of the 49th parallel. To drive there (if you can) you would have to go through Canada.
The Northwest Angle, I’ve been there. (I’ve also been to Key West, so I’ve been to the northernmost and southernmost points reachable by road in the continenental US).
My reading of the treaty would seem to imply that it is in fact the only land border—everything else in that section explicitly refers to lakes, rivers, and straits.
If you really want a good source for hi-res maps, you could always download the appropriate topo maps from The National Map. You can select the sections you want in the viewer and “order” them; you’ll then be sent an e-mail with links where you can download the PDFs.
I read your post for comprehension this time. Yes, you’re right, there are visible land bridges in a few of the views. I wonder if they’re sometimes under water, by the looks of a few of them.
It’s possible that most of them are bisected by small streams that mean they aren’t contiguous land areas, or as you say under water some of the time. Or maybe they’re just swamp, not quite land or water.
These are “slippy” maps that work the same way as Google or Bing maps, but offer a variety of basemaps, including a seamless set of US topos at various scales. Topos have the advantage of having been carefully edited by humans, whereas with Google Maps you never know whether the boundary dataset used was appropriate for the scale. Various themes get melded together by the computer without anyone checking for coincidence. ArcGIS Online offers several other options, including the topographic tiles brewed by Arc from various datasets that may be better than the state boundary dataset used by Google.
You can’t always go by the text of the treaty. Sometimes when the boundary is surveyed and monumented, the line described in the treaty will prove impractical or impossible, and it may be “clarified” by a later protocol, convention or annex. Or the monuments will be slightly inconsistent with the treaty, but both sides agree that the monuments define the boundary to avoid further disputes.
According to the above-linked article on the Height of Land Portage,
Using the ArcGIS site mentioned above, I’ve found more than just the 3 portages mentioned in the “Height of Land Portage” wiki article. Prairie Portage, Little Knife Portage, Carp Portage, South Lake Portage, Long Portage (which looks to be well over a mile long) plus at least 2 more unnamed ones (at least on the Topo maps.)
Looks like there’s a lot of land connections. Neither the topo resolution nor the google map resolution is really good enough to show if it’s along some seasonal drainage channel or not, but some of them look pretty solid.
