If you've been watching for the National Loon Center to rise near the Cross Lake dam, at the boat landing where the temporary Nest exhibit set up shop and the shoreline got a facelift a few years back, you've been watching the wrong patch of ground. The building everyone in Crosslake has been asking about since 2025 is going up on a separate, private ten-acre parcel between Swann Drive and Pioneer Drive, a short walk from Crosslake Ace Hardware. The dam-side site kept its dock, its restored shoreline and its outdoor loon-call exhibit. The museum went somewhere else entirely.
That distinction matters if you're trying to track this project by driving past it, because a lot of the early coverage and even some of the state funding language still describes the original plan: a facility built directly at the Cross Lake Recreation Area on land leased from the Army Corps of Engineers for 25 years. Somewhere between that lease and the June 2025 groundbreaking, the National Loon Center Foundation changed course. It kept its programming rights at the recreation area, including a floating dock system and mooring stations installed for campground visitors, and bought private land nearby to build the actual campus.
Why the building moved
The foundation's own timeline calls this an "enhancement to the original site plan," language that undersells how significant the shift was. Building on Corps-managed federal land comes with real constraints on what you can permanently alter. A campus with fifty geothermal wells, a solar canopy, EV charging stations and its own parking lot doesn't fit easily inside those limits. Moving to a privately owned wooded site gave the foundation control over grading, utilities and a parking lot shaped like a loon, complete with a paver "bill" and wing-shaped solar panels.
Crosslake Mayor Jackson Purfeerst spoke to what the project represents for the city at the June 2025 groundbreaking, held during the second annual Loons & Lakes Festival.
"Crosslake is built on strong values, pride in our town, respect for nature."
That ceremony also honored Jim Anderson, the community member who donated the property that became the new campus site. Anderson passed away in October 2024, before construction began on the land he gave.
What's actually finished right now
Skip past the fence and the building-progress updates the foundation has posted through this spring and summer tell a fairly detailed story of where the site stands. As of the most recent public updates:
- The concrete slab for the building has been poured
- Ten of the planned fifty geothermal wells were complete, with drilling continuing on the rest
- Underground work for the EV charging stations is finished
- Permanent power has been installed on site, along with a construction camera feeding the public livestream
- Elevator pit foundations and waterproofing are done, with the elevator shaft underway
- The parking lot has been paved and curbed, with the loon-shaped paver design and solar canopy foundations in progress
The geothermal system is the detail worth sitting with. Fifty wells drilled to use the earth's constant underground temperature is not a small addition to a building that started as a 15,000-square-foot facility. It's now described as 20,000 square feet, a scope increase that shows up in the well count, the solar array and the three-story exhibit build the foundation is developing with Dimensional Innovations, the Kansas City firm known locally for redesigning Target Field's Minnie and Paul handshake sign. That's the same team now building exhibits meant to put visitors inside a loon's life from float to flight.
Why spring 2027, not fall 2026
The opening date has moved in public materials more than once, and each move tracks with the project getting bigger rather than falling behind on a fixed plan.
Early state funding language, tied to the original $4 million Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund grant, described a target that would have had the center open years ago. When construction actually broke ground in June 2025, coverage at the time, including reporting from Widseth, the project's architecture firm, cited a fall 2026 opening. The foundation's own building-progress page and the most recent local newspaper coverage now confirm spring 2027 as the date, with the Pine and Lakes Echo Journal's 2026 Love of the Lakes feature stating plainly that visitors won't get through the doors until then.
None of that reads like delay for its own sake. It reads like a project that kept adding capability, a geothermal system here, a bigger exhibit footprint there, and let the calendar slide accordingly. The total campus cost has landed at $18.5 million, funded through a mix of the original $4 million state trust fund grant, a $2.5 million legislative bonding allocation to the city, and private donations covering the rest of a required $6 million match.
What's already open while the fence stays up
You don't need to wait until spring 2027 to get something out of this. The Nest, the foundation's temporary information center in Crosslake Town Square, has been running programming since 2021 and isn't going anywhere until the new building is ready. From May through September, the foundation runs guided pontoon tours aboard a boat nicknamed the StewardShip, mixing loon observation with lessons on protecting freshwater habitat. Kids ages 7 to 12 can join the Junior Loon Biologist program, which comes with a field journal and hands-on sessions rather than just a lecture.
The third annual Loons & Lakes Festival ran June 26 to 27 this year, with a Friday Lake Day that included guided paddle excursions, a bird walk with the Brainerd Audubon Society and a shoreline cleanup on the Whitefish Chain, followed by a Saturday Loon Fair in Town Square with vendors, food trucks and live music in the gazebo. If you missed it, the foundation's newsletter, called The Hoot, is where the 2027 schedule will surface first.
Catch a preview before winter
The nearest chance to see the Loon Center's public-facing side in action lands later this month. Crosslake Days, the city's annual fall festival, runs September 25 and 26, and the schedule includes a Loon Calling Contest at The Nest, split into divisions for kids under 12 and over 12. It's tucked into a weekend that also brings the Lost Chili Pepper Hunt, a chili cook-off judged across town by the Crosslake app, the Knights of Columbus cornhole tournament at Ace Hardware, and a street dance closing things out with live music from the T.C. Jammers and food from Maucieri's.
That's the same stretch of Pioneer Drive where the new Loon Center campus is rising. If you're at the cornhole tournament or the street dance this year, you're standing close enough to the future museum to see the construction fence from the sidewalk, even though the building itself won't open for another season or two.
The project you've been picturing at the dam and the project actually taking shape a few blocks over are both real parts of the same plan. One kept the water access, the dock repairs and the mooring stations. The other got the geothermal wells, the exhibit designers who worked on Target Field, and a spring 2027 date that keeps holding even as the building around it keeps growing.
Watching a small city fund and build something at this scale says something about how residents here think about the place they live, patient enough to let a project get bigger before it opens, and specific enough to know exactly which corner of town it's happening on. If that kind of local detail is part of why you're paying attention to Crosslake in the first place, Amanda Lumley would be glad to talk through what else is changing around town, real estate or otherwise. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready.
