Canoe the Minnehaha

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.