On September 12, riders will roll out of Tower Depot Park for a 30-mile round trip to Embarrass and back, 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.
That's the story every outlet from the Star Tribune to the Timberjay is covering this month, and it's true. What gets less attention is what actually happens when you wheel your bike out of Depot Park and pick a direction. 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.
What Actually Got Finished 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 it finally reads as one continuous line on a map instead of a patchwork with a hole in it near Tower.
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 Mile Locals Already Know About
Here's the part that doesn't make the anniversary coverage. 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 holdup wasn't money. It was plumbing. 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.
That's why, five years later, the newest section of the Mesabi got finished before the oldest section got fixed. Here's how the three key stretches out of Tower actually compare right now:
| 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 aside, this stretch is the one people consistently call the best riding on the whole system |
Where To Actually Point Your Bike 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. A dog walk or an evening ride out of town no longer dead-ends at a construction barrier past the edge of Soudan. 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. None of this required the ribbon cutting to happen. It required the pavement to actually connect, which is a different thing.
The Business Case Two Towns Over
The clearest evidence of what a finished trail can do for a small downtown isn't in Tower yet, it's over in Virginia. The Arrowhead, a tavern that opened next door to the longtime Canelake's Candies, did so specifically because increased bike traffic through downtown Virginia made the numbers work. Ciochetto has pointed to it as the kind of thing trail completion tends to produce in the towns it runs through.
That 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.
Thirty years is a long time to wait for a trail to connect two dots on a map. The dots are connected now, 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're the kind of person who wants the read on what's actually changing around Tower before it shows up in a press release, The Snyder Team spends as much time on this trail and this lake as anyone. Reach out any time you want the real version of what's happening around town, cabin dreams or not.
