ELBA, Minn. — It’s déjà vu for Winona County Sheriff Ron Ganrude. Deputies, responding to reports of a teen-age mega-beer blast in the woods, stopped carloads of minors roaming the roads downriver from Elba — either lost and looking for the party or already drunk and leaving. Ticketed were kids from all over — Rochester, 33 miles away; Blooming Prairie, 60 miles away; Lake City, 35 miles away; and Owatonna, 69 miles away. Is this all the same again as summer a year ago? “Sure looks like it,” Ganrude said. Like last summer, Ganrude said, the free-for-all had been organized on Facebook with online directions for driving there. The site was somewhere near the same remote Beaver crossroads as last summer — near the State Route 74 crossroads with County Road 30. This was up a minor tributary to the Whitewater River near Beaver — hidden at an elbow bend at a dead-end dirt trail on a state wildlife and fauna protection site. It was hardly a place to be out wandering around in the dark, especially if boozed up. Last year thee were fights, falls and injuries at these parties.
Policing priority: Get drunks off roads
Three Winona County deputies responded to calls about this summer’s inaugural beer blast, but they never got to the party itself. The deputies were fully occupied stopping carloads of drunken teens meandering on backroads around the Beaver crossroads. Stops included drunken driving, underage consumption and drunkenness, speeding, and erratic driving. Some drivers said they were lost. Deputies gave them directions to get home.
Policing lessons from 2024
Last summer Ganrude and fellow sheriffs finally got a handle on the clandestine parties by monitoring social media, assigning extra patrols to suspected sites, and inter-agency coordination. Of urgent concern then and now were drunken falls and injuries at remote and hard-to-reach locations, drunken automobile accidents, and campfire-triggered forest fires.
Earlier: Cops nip Beaver Creek bust early
Earlier: How cops pre-empted yet another rural beer bash