What a Mysterious Forest Shaped Like Minnesota Taught Me About Time Travel

The mystery started — as things so often do these days — on Reddit.

Browsing through the Minnesota subreddit, I came across a post headlined, “Look what I found on Google maps.”

But it wasn’t the title that caught my attention, it was the accompanying photo: a grove of trees shaped exactly like Minnesota.

At first, it seemed no one else could believe it either—there was suspicion it was photoshopped. But then the original poster specified the location, and another redditor confirmed it by posting a link to Google Maps. You can zoom in and out on the Minnesota-shaped forest all you want. It’s real.

Someone had meticulously created an exact replica of the state out of trees, at some indeterminate time in the past, and we were only just now finding out about it.

Or were we? As a reporter in Minnesota, I decided to crowdsource the investigation. I put up a blog post — “I can’t stop staring at this Minnesota-shaped forest” — summing up the Reddit thread and asking if anyone knew more.

“This is state forest land, managed by DNR Division of Forestry,” one commenter offered. “The state employs foresters to design timber harvests to meet many objectives including ecological and economic ones. The forester who designed this timber sale is a veteran at his craft and created this boundary line without the use of GPS, but with map and compass instead.”

I got in touch with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, which confirmed the story. The DNR spokeswoman said the shape had been created sometime in the “late 1980s/early 1990s” by a forestry technician named Bill Lockner.

But that was where the trail ran cold. I reached out to Lockner through several channels and received no response. Apparently, he had no interest in talking about his forest artistry. (Perhaps he’s still stinging from the initial reception—his supervisors at the DNR reportedly didn’t see the meticulous boundary design as an appropriate use of taxpayer money.)

That may have been where the inquiry ended, were it not for another suggestion from the comments: You can use Google Earth to go back in time and see what the forest looked like in the past.

I dimly remembered Google adding Historical Imagery back in 2009, but the details had gotten sloshed to the back of my memory by the never-ending firehose of tech news. When I downloaded Google Earth, I discovered that time travel was easy: just click on the clock icon, which brings up a slider of available dates.

Feeling a bit like Marty McFly, I dragged the slider to the earliest date: May 18, 1991. I was in for a surprise.

The image looked like the photo negative of the modern-day photo on Google Maps. Instead of a forest shaped like Minnesota, it was a clearing shaped like the state.

In my mind, I had imagined Lockner charting out the state’s shape and cutting down the surrounding trees. But here was clear evidence that more than two decades ago he had cut down the trees within the boundary instead.

Using the slider, I was able to zoom forward to the next available date: September 8, 2003. The Jack Pines that had been cut down were replaced with Red Pines, which by now had started to grow into healthy saplings.

Moving forward in time to September 14, 2008, the Red Pines had grown so tall that the outline of Minnesota was beginning to disappear back into the chaos of nature.

The next available picture, from September 29, 2009, shows the forest in its modern form. Sometime during the previous year, the DNR cut down the Jack Pines around outline of the state, preserving the Red Pine forest in the form of Minnesota.

This was a revelation. The time lapse photos from Google Earth were able to tell a story that public officials wouldn’t. You can also use it for local reporting: See how cities develop, suburbs sprawl, neighborhoods grow.

One of the more compelling uses of the photo trove has been to demonstrate the effects of global climate change. You can watch a glacier melt the same way I was able to watch a forest grow.

Recently, a local newspaper used Google Earth Historical Imagery to demonstrate the scale of the damage from the Washington mudslide.

What secrets can be discovered in your neck of the woods by time traveling on Google Earth? Now might be the time to find out.