Devils Lake
"This is a lake that decided, decades ago, to reclaim the town's edges — and nobody's stopped it yet."
A lake town that has spent thirty years fighting its own rising water, where flooded shelterbelts stand like ghost forests just offshore and the walleye fishing is, improbably, some of the best in the country. Lia and I came for a weekend of fishing with a local guide and left slightly obsessed with a lake that keeps swallowing its own roads.
Devils Lake is the kind of place where the local news still leads with water levels, and once you’ve driven past a submerged grove of drowned cottonwoods standing gray and leafless in the middle of open water, you understand why. Since the early 1990s the lake, which has no natural outlet, has risen more than twenty-five feet, swallowing farmland, county roads, and whole shelterbelts that now poke up as eerie snags a mile from shore. Lia found it beautiful in a way I hadn’t expected — less a flood story than a strange, slow-motion wetland taking over a prairie town of about seven thousand people who’ve simply adapted, raising roads and building new ones as the water claims the old.
Fishing with the locals
We hired a guide out of a bait shop near the Grahams Island causeway, and within twenty minutes of dropping lines Lia had reeled in a two-pound walleye — the lake’s flooding turned out to be an accidental blessing for fish habitat, and Devils Lake is now routinely ranked among the top walleye fisheries in North America, ice-fishing shanty villages sprouting on the lake by the hundreds every winter. Our guide, a retired schoolteacher who’d fished the lake his whole life, pointed out where his uncle’s farmhouse used to stand, now marked only by a lone flooded windbreak of Russian olive trees a few hundred yards offshore.
Sullys Hill and Spirit Lake Nation
South of town, Sullys Hill National Game Preserve protects a pocket of rolling hardwood hills unusual for this flat part of the state, with a small bison and elk herd and a loop drive we took at dusk, watching a bull elk cross the road ahead of us without hurry. The preserve sits on the Spirit Lake Nation reservation, and the tribal casino and cultural center on the lake’s south shore gave us a fuller sense of the Dakota history here than any museum display could — this land has been Spirit Lake territory long before it was a fishing destination.
Getting There
Devils Lake Regional Airport (DVL) has limited commercial service; most visitors fly into Grand Forks (GFK) or Fargo (FAR) and drive, about ninety minutes and two and a half hours respectively via US-2. A car is necessary for reaching the lake’s fishing accesses and Sullys Hill, both spread well outside the compact downtown.
Keep exploring
More of North Dakota
Keep exploring
More from North Dakota
united-statesRugby
A small railroad town famous for exactly one thing — a stone cairn marking the geographic center of North America — that turned out to have a lot more going on than its highway-sign fame suggests. Lia insisted we take the obligatory photo, and then we found the real reason to stay: a county museum stuffed with more history than its size has any right to hold.
Explore
united-statesValley City
A river town draped across the Sheyenne River valley on a string of bridges, seven of them still standing from the days when the Northern Pacific needed the tallest trestle in the state to cross it. Lia and I spent a slow afternoon walking bridge to bridge, which turned out to be the best way to see a town this size.
Explore
united-statesGrand Forks
A prairie river city straddling the Red River where North Dakota meets Minnesota, its flat farmland horizon interrupted only by grain elevators and a downtown rebuilt with quiet resolve after the great flood of 1997. Lia and I biked the greenway that flood built and found a town that turned its worst disaster into its best public space.
Explore
united-statesBottineau
A forested hill-country town tucked against the Turtle Mountains, the closest thing North Dakota has to a ski town, guarded by a twenty-six-foot fiberglass turtle riding a snowmobile. Lia and I came expecting flat prairie and found actual hills, actual trees, and a roadside attraction too strange not to love.
Explore
united-statesBismarck
A quiet capital on the Missouri River where prairie sky meets frontier history at every turn, from a Gothic capitol tower to a reconstructed Mandan earthlodge village. Lia and I expected a pass-through stop and instead found a full, unhurried day of discovery.
Explore
united-statesMandan
Bismarck's quieter twin across the Missouri River, where a reconstructed earthlodge village tells a much older story than the state capital ever will. Lia and I crossed the river for an afternoon and ended up watching the sun set over Fort Abraham Lincoln from a bluff we practically had to ourselves.
Explore