![[Lake scene drawing]](http://images.midwestweekend.com/graphics/lake_scene.gif)
There are many colossal lumberjacks, voyageurs and Indian chiefs scattered around Minnesota, all paying tribute to a colorful past.
But there's only one Big Ole.
He stands at the end of Alexandria's Broadway Street, 28 feet of glowering Viking, brandishing a spear and clutching a glistening silver shield that reads "Alexandria, Birthplace of America.''
It was an early January day in western Minnesota. A biting wind was blowing off the prairie, and the mercury was sinking faster than the Titanic.
But it didn’t matter. I was at Maplelag, where the world is my iceberg . . . um, oyster.
At Maplelag, no matter how inhospitable the outside world is, the lodge’s stained-glass windows turn the wan rays of winter into gleaming golds and apricots. The steam billowing from the giant hot tub creates a dome of warmth amid the tundra. Bottomless cookie jars and baskets of hot fry bread keep guests fat and happy.
Sinclair Lewis was thinking about Otter Tail County when he chided Minnesotans for not knowing about their own "haunts of beauty.''
Few know that Otter Tail County has more lakes than any other county in Minnesota — 1,048 — or even that it has lakes at all. It also has the state's densest concentration of giant mascots and roadside sculpture, as well as two state parks, a picture-postcard mill and Inspiration Peak, the state's second-highest point after Eagle Mountain on the North Shore.
The rolling landscape was created by the back-and-forth scraping of glaciers from four ice ages, which left a glacial moraine of kames, piles of sand and gravel dropped by glacial meltwater, and kettles, created when block of ice fell off the glaciers, pressed into the earth, melted and filled up again as ponds and lakes.
It’s a radical idea, but here goes: In Minnesota, you can go up to the lake by heading west.
These lakes not only are out west, they’re less than two hours from the Twin Cities, in a pocket of the state many overlook.
“It was a secret to me,’’ said Michele Stillinger, a former Twin Citian working as a naturalist at Sibley State Park. “I thought I wouldn’t find anything out here; I was very surprised.’’
In Kandiyohi County, it's thanks to the last Ice Age that life's a beach today.
Near Willmar, a lobe of the last glacier came to a grinding halt 12,000 years ago, dumping massive blocks of ice that made big dents in the ground.
Now, they're lakes, popping up like mirages at the edge of soybean fields, behind screens of ash and cottonwoods. Farther north, they're hidden amid rocky meadows and rolling hillocks full of glacial rubble.
