According to the Timberjay, on September 12, riders will roll out of Tower Depot Park for a group ride, then return to food trucks, live music, and a crowd that has waited three decades for this particular Saturday. Three days later, on September 15, the ribbon gets cut at the same depot, with local officials on hand to mark something under construction since before some of Tower's newer residents were born: a fully paved, 165-mile trail running from Grand Rapids to Ely.
The new connection is a milestone, and pavement conditions differ depending on which direction you ride out of Depot Park. Head south toward Embarrass and you're riding pavement laid down in the past few weeks. Head north toward Soudan, which is the way most people who actually live in Tower will go first, and you're on some of the oldest, roughest asphalt anywhere on the system.
The New Trail Connection This Month
The piece that closed this month is a 6.5-mile stretch between Tower and Embarrass, the last real gap in a corridor that has linked 28 communities across the Mesabi and Vermilion iron ranges since planning began in the early 1990s and the first pavement went down in 1995. Sarah Ciochetto, deputy director of the St. Louis and Lake Counties Regional Railroad Authority, and Bob Manzoline, who has run point on the project since its inception, have spent thirty years piecing this together segment by segment. This month, the trail became one continuous line on the map.
Roughly 285,000 people rode or walked some part of the trail in 2025, before this final stretch even existed. That number is worth sitting with for a second, because it means the trail was already a working piece of daily life for the region well before anyone could ride the whole thing without interruption.
The Tower-to-Soudan Stretch
The Tower-to-Soudan stretch, roughly a mile and a half, was one of the very first segments of the entire Mesabi Trail, built more than two decades ago to connect the two towns before the rest of the network existed. Riders who've been out there recently still describe it as cracked and rutted, the kind of surface that stands out precisely because the rest of the trail has been rebuilt or freshly paved around it.
Funding to fix it isn't a new idea. Back in 2021, $600,000 was already lined up for the reconstruction, split between state legacy bonding, a federal trails grant, and the rail authority itself. The reconstruction also had to be coordinated with plumbing work. The original trail sits on top of forced wastewater mains serving both towns, and the joint Tower-Soudan wastewater board decided to replace roughly 20 aging manholes along that same route at the same time, so the two projects could share an engineer and a construction window instead of tearing up the same ground twice.
The new section was completed before the older section's rebuild. Here's how the three key stretches out of Tower compare:
| Segment | Distance | Current condition |
|---|---|---|
| Tower to Embarrass | 6.5 miles | Brand-new pavement, finished this month |
| Tower to Soudan | about 1.5 miles | Original 1990s-era asphalt, funded for rebuild since 2021, not yet replaced |
| Tower to Ely (full run) | riders online put it around 23 miles | The rough first mile and a half aside, this stretch is the one people consistently call the best riding on the whole system |
Where to Ride from Tower This Month
If you're planning a ride out of Depot Park this fall, the direction you choose changes the experience more than the calendar milestone suggests.
- Toward Embarrass and on to Ely: this is the freshest surface on the entire 165-mile system right now, and arguably the smoothest riding in the whole corridor.
- Toward Soudan and the state park: expect a bumpy first mile and a half before the pavement improves once you're inside Lake Vermilion-Soudan Underground Mine State Park, where the trail has historically drawn some of its best reviews.
- Starting point: pick up the trail near the old train museum by Depot Park. Anyone 18 or older on a wheeled bike needs a Wheel Pass, $10 for five nonconsecutive days or $20 for the year, with the proceeds going toward trail programming and maintenance. Walkers, runners, and snowshoers don't need one.
What This Changes for a Normal Week
The headline is a ribbon cutting, but the more useful change is quieter. The new Tower-to-Embarrass connection gives evening rides and dog walks a longer route out of town. If you've got out-of-town family visiting for a weekend and the state park campground is booked solid, which happens often, HooDoo Point Campground right in Tower and McKinley Park Campground in Soudan are both realistic backups now that the connecting trail between them is finished.
Tower's Friday farmers market at the Mini-park by the train, which runs from June through the growing season into September, sits close enough to the new trailhead that a ride can double as a produce run before the market winds down for the year. The completed connection makes these everyday uses possible.
What the New Connection Means for Tower
The new connection doesn't guarantee anything specific for downtown Tower's storefronts. It does mean the foot and wheel traffic that used to stop at the edge of town now has a reason to keep moving through it, in both directions, for the first time.
What's Still Just a Plan
Ciochetto has floated future extensions toward Fortune Bay Resort Casino on Lake Vermilion and separately toward Cook, and both would matter a lot to people who live on this side of the lake. Neither has a funded construction timeline the way the Aurora-to-Hoyt Lakes segment does, which is already targeted for completion by the end of 2027. Worth knowing if you're curious whether the trail eventually reaches closer to your own dock. Not something to plan a summer around yet.
The trail now connects Grand Rapids and Ely, but if you live here, the more useful thing to know is that the connection isn't uniform, and the direction you choose out of Depot Park still matters.
If you want a local perspective on changes around Tower, The Snyder Team spends as much time on this trail and this lake as anyone. Reach out any time to talk about what's happening around town, cabin dreams or not.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
