Sault Rapids is a run of fast, clear water on the Rainy River inside Franz Jevne State Park, east of Birchdale off Highway 11 in Koochiching County. A picnic area on the south bank overlooks the rapids, and the park’s riverside hiking trail brings you to open views across the water to Ontario, Canada, on the far shore. Known to the Ojibwe as Ginwaajiwanaang — “the place of the long rapids” — and recorded by mapmakers as Long Sault Rapids, this reach was a landmark on the old fur-trade canoe route that followed the Rainy River toward Lake of the Woods, and its rocky bed and swift current have long been spawning grounds for lake sturgeon.
The rapids sit within one of Minnesota’s smallest state parks — a secluded, roughly 120-acre preserve of jack pine, birch, and towering white pines that the Jevne family donated in the 1960s and the Legislature established in 1967, named for Franz Jevne, a Koochiching County lawyer. About two and a half miles of trails wind along the river and up a high rock outcrop to open-sky overlooks, and anglers work the Rainy here for walleye, northern pike, smallmouth bass, and sturgeon. Watch the banks for beaver, eagles, and pelicans; wolves and moose range the surrounding forest.
