One of the things I love the most about living in Minnesota is the wide variety of water sports we have available to us. I have been paddling on the local lakes for the last two summers now and have had some really fun times with Chris and the kids exploring the local lakes. I have not however had a chance or should I say made the time to try my hand at river paddling. This has been on my mind for the last several weeks. The first time I started looking into river paddling, we were just coming off a week of pretty heavy rain. I wanted to make sure that the first trip I took with the kids was safe and fun. There are some great online resources for checking the flow rats of all the streams and rivers in the state. Every river I checked was at or over the safe flow for canoe or kayaking. Since we have had a dry spell the last couple of weeks, I checked the flow levels for the most local of all the river routes, the 22 mile paddle trail on
Minnehaha Creek.
Minnehaha Creek runs from the southwest corner of
Lake Minnetonka and flows east through the western suburbs and the southern urban Minneapolis before emptying into the Missisippi river. I was intrigued by this route for several reasons. The launch area is close, less than 6 miles from my house. Easy for Chris to give me and Nik a ride and drop us and our gear at the landing. It's very established river trail, very well marked, with landings every 1-2 miles where we could get out the the canoe and stretch, use a restroom etc. Finally, many of these landings also work as extraction sites, giving us flexibility on how far down the river our journey could go before calling it quits. I started watching the flow rates on the web about 2 weeks ago. At first the rates were well above what is considered safe for paddling. By last week Tuesday, I had a pretty good feeling that this weekend would give us a good window. Since Friday was a holiday, I decided to take a vacation day on Thursday and give the route a try. Nik and Catie have bother expressed interest, but since Catie was sick this week, Nik was my guy.
Chris gave Nik and I a ride to the
Gray's Bay Dam landing, on the southeast corner of Lake Minnetonka. The Dam is in place to manage the water level on Lake Minnetonka. It would not be good if too much rain caused all the multi-million dollar homes on the shoreline to be flooded out! We loaded all our gear into the canoe and got the boat settled into the water. Chris snapped a few photo's of us at the landing before handing me the camera and watching us shove off on our adventure. The first mile of the trip had us paddling through a lazy, quiet stretch of wetland. The current was slow, but it was very scenic. Almost immediately we had the feeling that we were much further away from civilization that we actually were. The sky was a beautiful blue with billowing white clouds and a comfortable light wind blowing. A perfect day for paddling.
Once we passed under the I-494 freeway overpass things started to get a bit more exciting. We entered a low concrete culvert, just high enough to clear our heads. At the far end was the first of what would be many small stretches of white water. Not much by big river standards, but given how narrow and shallow the creek is things got pretty interesting, pretty quickly. After several more stretches of faster moving while water, we came to a slower moving section that wandered through suburban neighborhoods. The way the yards backed up to the creek was just like lake property. Many had some piers with canoe's or kayaks on them. How cool to live in a city like setting and still have water front that you can paddle around on, just outside your own back yard!
The water level was on the lower side of optimum. There were two spots where we got well and truly stuck in low, fast moving water, hung up on rocks. It took some fast thinking to get us free. All the while, Nik did a great job of reacting to my orders on when and on what side I needed him to paddle. Navigating the fast water definitely required all our attention. After 3-1/2 hours of paddling, we came upon our final destination, the Taco Bell in St Louis Park. Taco Bell actually has a boat landing for paddlers to stop for lunch. How cool is that! Once on shore, Nik exclaimed..."I'm so happy to be back on Dry Land!" Only then did Nik let me know that during many of the white water sections, he was freaking out! At the time it was happening I had no idea, he was always calmly dealing with the situation at hand. As we sat down to have our lunch, Nik explained how he could feel the stress draining out of his body! After lunch, Chris met us at Taco Bell and we loaded up the car for the ride home. As I sit back and ponder the day, we really had ourselves quite an adventure. I now have a new canoeing buddy, and we both have some valuable river experience. I can't wait to do the next 8 mile section!
Please visit my
family web site for more photo's of our canoe trip on Minnehaha Creek.
The highlight of the day was a visit to Mammoth Cave National Park, located about halfway between Nashville, TN and Louisville, KY. The park is in about 10 miles off the interstate, heavily wooded and very hilly. After a stop at the visitor center we were encouraged to take a cave tour to really get the full experience of the park. We took the shortest tour which was about 2 hours, all underground. It was a very interesting little adventure. Lot's of narrow stairs, and skinny short little passageways. Catie was initially a little scarred. So I told her to pretend it was a ride and Disneyland (the rock almost looked fake like that) and surprisingly that seemed to help. There were also several large chambers that we visited. One section called Frozen Niagara was a 50 foot rock formation that looked like a frozen waterfall. Very cool. I tried taking some pictures but with the low light they didn't turn out too well.
After leaving the park, we drove into a very strong Thunder storm. The rain was really pouring down, so much so that the wipers could not keep up. So, with huge flashes of lightning and loud booming claps of thunder we slowly made our way north. To make things even more exciting, we were running low on gas. So after about 15 minutes of crawling along, we came to a gas station. Even though Chris and the kids cautioned against it, I stopped and got out to fill up. Just as I was putting the nozzle in the tank a huge bolt of lightning crashed, so close that the flash and boom were simultaneous. The power to the gas pump went out and the hair on the back of my neck stood up! In the blink of an eye, I put away the nozzle and hustled back into the car. OK Lord, I get it! Not the right time to be pumping gas!! So we drove further north, eventually getting out ahead of the storm. We were then able to make our way to the small town of Munfordville Kentucky. After filling up the tank we stopped in at the local Pizza Hut for dinner. The restaurant was decorated with photos commemorating the civil war Battle for Munfordwille including a photo of the "Captor of Munfordville" General Braxton Bragg. I very powerful reminder that we are in the south! 
