MINONG, Wisconsin — Two drivers were killed on Wednesday evening in a head-on, wrong-way crash on U.S. Highway 53 just north of Minong in Washburn County, a collision that closed the highway's northbound lanes for about three hours and that the Wisconsin State Patrol was still investigating on Thursday, after releasing the names of both men.
Source: KDAL News, via WDSM 710 AM
The State Patrol and area first responders were called to the scene just before 6 p.m. on Wednesday, November 4. Initial information released by authorities shows that one of the two vehicles was travelling southbound in the northbound lanes of Highway 53 when it crashed into a vehicle travelling northbound. The drivers — the only occupants of the two vehicles — both sustained fatal injuries. Dispatch traffic from the response placed the crash near County Road T, in the Wascott area just north of Minong, with Washburn County deputies, Minong Fire, the State Patrol and Douglas County assistance all responding as the highway was shut down.
The two drivers identified on Thursday
In an update released on Thursday afternoon, the Wisconsin State Patrol identified the two men as Nicholas Groszbach, 47, of Hibbing, Minnesota, and James Paske, 80, of Minong, Wisconsin. Both men died following the head-on collision. The identification turns a short overnight police report into two specific losses: an 80-year-old local man from the small Washburn County community the highway passes, and a 47-year-old from Hibbing, across the state line in Minnesota's Iron Range country, more than an hour's drive north of the crash scene.
Authorities have not publicly confirmed which of the two drivers was travelling the wrong way, and the State Patrol has not announced why a vehicle entered the northbound lanes. No cause has been established in the information released so far.
That unanswered question is now the centre of the investigation. Wrong-way entries on a divided highway can follow a missed or misread interchange, confusion in darkness, a medical episode or impairment — but investigators have attributed this crash to none of those, and Awaaz Punjab is not speculating about either driver. What the State Patrol has confirmed is limited and precise: the directions of travel, the time, the place, the closure, and, a day later, the names.
The Highway 53 corridor
U.S. Highway 53 is the main north–south route through north-west Wisconsin, linking the Duluth–Superior area with Eau Claire and carrying a heavy mix of local traffic, tourists heading to lake country and freight trucks. Around Minong and Wascott the highway runs through pine forest and small communities where it is both the everyday main street route and the through-route for long-distance drivers. A full closure in the early evening — the crash came just before 6 p.m., after dark in November at this latitude — leaves drivers with long rural detours on county roads.
For truckers who run Highway 53 between the Twin Ports and Eau Claire, the crash is a reminder of the corridor's hardest risk: a wrong-way vehicle in the opposing lanes of a divided highway at night gives an oncoming driver almost no time or space to react. The northbound lanes reopened after about three hours once the scene investigation allowed traffic through, according to the State Patrol's reporting of the closure.
What happens next
The Wisconsin State Patrol's investigation remains active. Its next steps are the reconstruction of how the southbound vehicle came to be in the northbound lanes and a final determination of cause, neither of which had been announced by Thursday evening. No charges arise from a crash in which both drivers died, but the patrol's findings will still matter — to the two families, to insurers, and to any decision by the Wisconsin Department of Transportation about signage or markings at the interchanges near Minong. Awaaz Punjab will update this story if the State Patrol releases its determination.