

MTT. Minnesota Tournament Trail
NWT. National Walleye Tour
AIM. Angler’s Insight Marketing
Chili Bowl, Border View Lodge
Arnesen’s, Summer Tournament
River Bend Resort, Ladies tournament
Zippel Bay Resort, Northern Pike Tournament
AND MORE!
Lake of the Woods is known as a world class fishery. Anglers travel thousands of miles to fish these famous waters. There is a wide variety of fish, a good population of fish, and flat out trophy fish within Lake of the Woods. Whether stepping aboard a resort charter boat, in with a private guide, or navigating using your own boat, the 42 navigable miles of the Rainy River, big open waters of Big Traverse Bay, and the thousands of islands up at the NW Angle rarely disappoint.
Many visitors coming to the area appreciate jumping on a resort charter boat or in with a private guide. Everything is provided: the rods and reels, bait, tackle, life jackets, fish cleaning, etc. By request, they provide lunch and beverages as well. A licensed charter captain leads your adventure. He/she knows where they fish are and they work with other guides to make sure you have the best chance for success.
Bring your own boat or rent a boat from a local resort. There are many boat ramps along with miles and miles of water both in the Rainy River and Lake of the Woods loaded with fish. GPS units, map chips and mapping apps for your smartphone have the waters well marked for navigation. Open water fishing takes place from the end of March when the Rainy River begins to open into November when the water begins to freeze up. Have your camera ready, this is where memories are made.
There are three great fishing areas. The first is the Rainy River. From the mouth of the river at Wheeler’s Point, there are 42 miles of navigable river all the way to Birchdale, MN. the second area is the big open waters of Big Traverse Bay. This area is about 30 miles north/south by 25 miles east/west. The deepest point in this big basin is only 38 feet deep and it is loaded with walleyes, saugers and a wide variety of fish. The third area is the NW Angle. The Angle is the northernmost point of the contiguous U.S. and is where the 14,552 islands of the lake begin. This area is loaded with a variety of structure and fish.
Experienced resorts and outfitters do the work so you can ice fish in comfort and relax. Ice guides start working on the ice early in the year, staking roads and trails, plowing, smoothing out trails, and basically maintaining the ice roads daily. Heated fish houses are available and moved often to stay on the fish. Ice anglers have the option of staying at a resort, cabin or hotel on shore at night, or, experiencing sleeping on the ice in a sleeper fish house. Round trip transportation to your fish houses or a plowed ice road to the front door of your fish house is provided. Ice guides will clean your fresh catch and most area resorts will cook up your fresh catch.
Ice anglers may bring their own fish houses. Whether it’s a pull-behind fish house that anglers can sleep in overnight or collapsible fish houses meant to set up and take down daily, opportunities abound, Anglers can access the lake by plowed ice roads provided at a small daily use fee from resorts or access the snowmobile trails that are groomed and staked across the lake.
Some resorts plow ice roads allowing visitors to drive right out to the fish houses. Resorts take great care in checking ice thickness, plowing snow and making sure the roads are well-marked and in good shape.
Check out the different species located within Lake of the Woods as well as when each species is in season.
The Rainy River offers 7 boat landings on the Minnesota border with full access to the Rainy River and beautiful Lake of the Woods. At the mouth of the Rainy River, most resort guests use the Wheeler’s Point public access.
Keep it Clean is an organization which was created by a group of locals including the Tourism Bureau and the MN DNR Soil and Water Conservation members to promote a clean Lake of the Woods and to bring together a variety of stakeholders to do so.
Catch up on the buzz around the lake with our latest blog posts. Stay informed about upcoming events, conservation efforts, and community stories that make Lake of the Woods a vibrant and dynamic destination. Our blog is your go-to source for staying connected with the pulse of this captivating region.
Lake of the Woods
We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability.
To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.
This website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI (user interface) and design it to their personal needs.
Additionally, the website utilizes an AI-based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level constantly. This application remediates the website’s HTML, adapts Its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by the blind users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments.
If you’ve found a malfunction or have ideas for improvement, we’ll be happy to hear from you. You can reach out to the website’s operators by using the following email
Our website implements the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters your site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate your site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:
Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.
These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.
Keyboard navigation optimization: The background process also adjusts the website’s HTML, and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the website using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with Esc, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key.Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus, available at any time by clicking Alt+1, or as the first elements of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and not allow the focus drift outside it.
Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.
We aim to support the widest array of browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers).
Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their needs. There may still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our accessibility, adding, updating and improving its options and features, and developing and adopting new technologies. All this is meant to reach the optimal level of accessibility, following technological advancements. For any assistance, please reach out to