One can travel by boat to roughly thirty miles from Kensington, MN where the stone was found via Hudson Bay, the Nelson River, Lake Winnipeg, and the Red and Ottertail Rivers. In the late 1800s a steamship used to run from Fergus Falls, MN to Winnipeg.
There is a reference to a voyage that went beyond Greenland, which returned to Bergen, Norway in 1364, two years after the date on the stone. While this was known in the 19th century when the stone was unearthed, it was known only as an English expedition, not a Norse journey. It was not until the 1950s that it was commonly know that the expedition was indeed Norse.
Examinations by geologists point to considerable weathering of the inscribed surface, and though it is nearly impossible to properly date an inscription through weathering, it appears to have been created prior to the settlement of the area.