Wahpper on its mound in Wahpeton, North Dakota. Photo by jchuk, via Atlas Obscura.

The Red River is channel catfish water, and in 1997 Wahpeton, North Dakota put a 40-foot one on the bank to say so.

Local organizations raised about $12,000 for a giant sculpture to advertise the town and its river, and Wisconsin sculptor Dave Oswald, who also made Salem Sue, New Salem’s giant Holstein, built the fish in fiberglass. It was unveiled on August 3, 1997, with a community fish fry.

The name is a pun: a whopper of a fish, from Wahpeton. The details reward a stop. The head is heavy and dark, the mouth wide and downturned, the eye a small yellow disc, the whiskers drooping at the chin. It lies on a heap of painted river stones, as if the water had just left.

The water does come back. Atlas Obscura says the spring snowmelt regularly lifts the river until it rings the pedestal for several days, and a hotel clerk told Roadside America that the fish then looks like it is swimming. Come during the snowmelt for that; the rest of the year it sits high and dry on its mound.

It weighs 5,000 pounds per North Dakota tourism, Roadside America and Atlas Obscura; Wikipedia’s infobox prints 50,000, which looks like a typo. “World’s largest” also needs a footnote: Dunnville, Ontario has a bigger catfish statue.

To go, the fish stands in the Kidder Recreation Area at the north end of Wahpeton, about 100 feet from the Minnesota line across the river, at 86 Dabill Drive. Visiting is free, dawn to dusk, with a paved path to it. Atlas Obscura lists a different street address, so go by coordinates (46.2889, -96.5970) if your map argues. There is nothing else to the visit: look at the fish, take the selfie, leave.