Situated on the southern portion of the Canadian Shield, Voyageurs National Park contains the most complete and extensive Pre-Cambrian geologic features in the United States. In fact, the rock formations in the park, many more than 2.5 billion years old, are some of the oldest exposed rock in the world. This region was born of underwater volcanic eruptions that created mountainous islands rising from a sea that does not exist today. Two million years of advancing and retreating glaciers eroded the land, scouring and sculpting an area that may have previously resembled the Great Plains. What was left behind was the water of melted glaciers and a barren, jumbled landscape of ancient bedrock, polished and marked by glacial striations.

Eight thousand years ago much of the area that is Voyageurs National Park today may have been covered by Lake Agassiz, what is possibly the largest freshwater lake to have ever existed.

The plant life of Voyageurs National Park, like the landscape itself, is a demonstration of diversity and change. Vegetation in the park is primarily mixed forest. The park is located in an area called an ecotone, which is a transition area between different ecological communities containing species from both. At Voyageurs the shift is predominantly between deciduous northern hardwoods forest and conifer-dominated southern boreal forest, although the park’s array of ecosystem types includes fire-dependent forests, mesic hardwood forests, wet forests, peat-lands, fens, marshes, rocky outcrops, and lakeshore environments.