McCarthy Beach

Hiking Club Trail #55

HIKE DETAILS
Date: October 7, 2022
Location: Side Lake, MN
Length: 3.0 Miles
Difficulty: Moderate
Cumulative Hiking Club Miles: 154.2 of 197

This park is BIG, kinda disjointed  and hard to navigate with minimum maintenance roads. You must take at least a small length of a minimum maintenance road to access the HCT. We parked in the Pickerel Lake parking lot that you need to take a short spur trail to the actual trail (this will add 1 mile total to your hike) just to stay off of the larger minimum maintenance road.

The trail was wide and nice - the woods were beautiful. Fall colors were past peak by about a week but were still good. Dogs flushed out 6 grouse.

The trail gets rough and narrow as you get to Pickerel Lake - great views just harder.

I think this was my favorite park of this trip.