Cook County is Minnesota’s 12th largest county by area, and 90% of it is public land. It’s Minnesota’s 7th least populous county, and has only one traffic light (downtown Grand Marais). This is a corner of the state where you feel like the whole world is yours.
Naturally, all this public space makes Cook County a recreational paradise. Unsurprisingly, tourism plays a vital role in driving local economic growth and prosperity. So, how does a county with 5,600 people attract 1.2 million visitors a year to this extreme northeast tip of Minnesota? And who are the creative brains that transform mud season into Waterfall Season, and American Siberia into skiers’ bliss?
Visit Cook County (VCC) is the county’s destination marketing organization launched in 2010 to capitalize on the area’s vibrant culture, natural beauty, and thriving arts and craft community. Here’s how VCC turns seeming isolation into tourism lifeblood.
Linda Jurek, executive director of Visit Cook County, sees her “small but mighty” staff as playing a key role in the county’s livelihood. “We in Cook County are 81% reliant on tourism for jobs in our economy. And we have a lot of data that supports that. We track our Canadian traffic at the border, for example,” says Jurek. (For those curious, personal vehicle passenger totals entering Cook County from Canada ranged monthly from 13,841 people in January to 46,696 in August, 2024).
“We do campaigns in Thunder Bay. Canadians love coming here for alpine skiing at Lutsen, bike races like the Le Grand du Nord and Lutsen 99er, and for snowmobiling,” says Jurek. Vick adds that Canadians are critical to the Grand Portage Lodge and Casino’s visitor base, where there is an immense network of snowmobile trails.
The founding members of Visit Cook County include the Grand Marais Area Tourism Association (GMATA), Lutsen-Tofte Tourism Association (LTTA), Gunflint Trail Association (GTA), Lutsen Mountains, and the Grand Portage Tribal Council. These organizations came together in 2010 to strengthen Cook County’s brand identity. They combined their efforts to provide a coordinated marketing approach to attracting visitors to Cook County, while increasing efficiency and better leveraging budgets and personnel.
County. | VISIT COOK COUNTY
But Visit Cook County goes beyond promoting the average touristy stroll on the Lake Superior waterfront in Grand Marais, or sending it down the slopes at Lutsen Mountains. While everyone wants to vacation around crystal blue waters and catch lots of fish in summer (Cook County has both in spades), or experience Minnesota’s longest vertical runs at Lutsen, it takes a certain creative flair to turn other times of the year, such as “mud season,” into tourist gold.
Take the “Hygge Festival,” created by Visit Cook County to celebrate everything warm and cozy on cold winter days. “It’s about getting people to rethink their perspective on winter,” says Kjersti Vick, marketing and public relations director at Visit Cook County.
“Hygge” (pronounced hoo-gah) is a Danish cultural concept that refers to the ritual of embracing life’s simple pleasures. The idea is right at home in Cook County, where people come to relax, get cozy by a fire, and be surrounded by the warmth of family, friends, and community. Think mulled wine, sleigh rides, and the “Winter Fireplace Tour of Cook County” curated by VCC – a listing of all the different public locations in the county with crackling fires.
Visit Cook County elevated the hygge concept to festival status in 2017, the same year the word was added to the Oxford English Dictionary. This year’s Hygge Festival takes place on February 7-17, 2025, and is actively promoted by Visit Cook County.
Another fine example of VCC’s creative approach to tourism is the “Dark Sky Festival,” the 6th annual edition of which took place December 12-14, 2024 in Grand Marais. “We were on the forefront of the dark skies initiative in Minnesota,” recounts Vick. “You can see other communities building off that, and people are getting really excited about it.”
The data backs Vick up: “People really want to know about finding Northern Lights, and where to go. Other than our home page and our webcams, the Dark Skies content pages are consistently in the top 10 website hits,” Vick says. One of these popular online resources is VCC’s “Northern Lights Driving Routes” map, which gives suggestions leading to the best places in the county for dark sky viewing.
The list of creative “shoulder season” activities goes on, such as the Moose Madness Family Festival in October. Visit Cook County makes these tourism events tick at times of the year when visitors are less likely to venture north otherwise.
Sometimes tourism can take on oversized proportions for the local communities, burdening public services. Take the COVID summer of 2020, for example. Cook County’s “One Moose Apart” (6 feet) tourism campaign was a major success, and the county was inundated with visitors. In comparison to many other tourism destinations, Cook County was identified early on as a safe location for travel. Having so much outdoor space, many county communities saw increased visitor traffic.
The county had to adapt quickly. “We really took care of how we handle a lot of people,” explains Jurek. “Part of it is providing education to those visitors who are new to the area,” concurs Vick. “We work on building awareness of ‘here’s how you respect the environment that you’re in.’”
Vick also mentions wayfinding. “As tourism increases, we’ve had to get better at providing more wayfinding information, and not direct everybody to exactly the same spot to see fall colors, or hike the same loop. There are so many other good spots to go explore and see.”
Visit Cook County also impresses on visitors that the isolated nature of the county’s geography means people can be far away from the only hospital, in Grand Marais, or from fire or police services. “We educate people to be safe and take care of themselves,” says Jurek. “Sure, we love to promote wild ice, for example, and we want you to get out there and experience it, but you better have a rope, and a lifejacket, and tell people where you’re going,” Jurek explains.
And yet the county does a remarkable job keeping roads plowed in wintertime, clearing downed trees on remote forest roads, and generally helping outsiders who get lost, or stuck in the snow. “That’s the advantage of working in a tight-knit community,” says Jurek. “Government and community advocacy relationships work really well here, knowing what issues are happening.”
Tourism brings energy, excitement, and enthusiasm into the community, and the community gives back. The annual summer and winter solstice pageants at the North House Folk School, for example, are free outdoor puppet theater events that bring community members of all ages together to perform for wide audiences. The arts, such as these solstice shows, benefit from increased visitation to the otherwise quiet county, and vice versa.
Visit Cook County has a small but mighty administrative team of nine employees. These hearty souls have taken a remote area of the state, surrounded by the endless water of Lake Superior to the east, the international border with Canada to the north, and the roadless Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to much of the west, and turned these extremes into assets.
With winter 2024-2025 shaping up to be a prime snow year in Cook County, the region is once again shaping up to be the envy of the whole state for its snowpack. But once mud season (oops, Waterfall Season) sets in come spring, look for Visit Cook County to cook up more crafty ways to attract new visitors in sustainable ways.
Go to visitcookcounty.com to learn more about upcoming events, or plan your next trip up north.
