Hiking the Mississippi River Gorge

The Mississippi River gorge is probably my favorite place to take a walk in the Twin Cities.  Located in the city, but definitely makes you feel that you are not in the city.  One goal I've had is to walk and explore both sides of the river from the Ford Parkway all the way into downtown Minneapolis. Roughly that is a 12 mile loop or so.  I may not have gone down every trail, but I've walked most of them now.

A couple of weeks ago I was hiking in some of the areas of the gorge that I had missed.  On the St. Paul side of the river near the University of St. Thomas is an area called Shadow Falls Park.  I had been wondering what was underneath the bridge that crosses East River Parkway.  I was there last summer at some point but didn't go down the path to see what was in the ravine.  I can check that off my things to do list now.  There was graffiti of course, and I liked the message here.  "Derive an understanding of our differences, don't surrender to the developing doom".

And I enjoyed this blobby little character too.  Perhaps it was painted by someone just finishing a science class on germs and diseases.

What I didn't expect to see was a grave marker a little further up the ravine away from the river.  There were a series of crosses so we followed them along the path.

There were five or six grave markers and my first thought was "this is weird", but walking up the ravine led us to this peaceful, beautiful little grotto.  If we had walked back down the ravine to the river, I think we would have come to the falls at Shadow Falls Park.  Instead we walked to the overlook where a guy in a Hawaiian shirt was serenading folks with his bag pipes.  A volunteer was collecting trash and I thanked him for his efforts.

There was some trash left over from a party that was too far down the cliff for either him or me to climb down and retrieve.

Across the river on the Minneapolis side, there were a bunch of canoes and folks enjoying the beach.  My guess is the canoes were from Wilderness Inquiry, a group that offers canoeing opportunities on the river.  I've been to that beach and generally people refer to it as the Lake Street Beach.  There were 4 or 5 people swimming and I always wonder about swimming and water quality issues here.  Eventually, I hope, we will improve the water quality on the river to the point that swimming here will be a more normal activity.

 A little further up river is another beach called White Sands Beach.  Now there is a spot I didn't know about and had not explored.

I walked back home and picked up bits of trash all the way to the U of M before hopping on the light rail for home.  I did not take that bridge girder with me.  Exhausted, but ready to find out about White Sands Beach on another day.  Although this article is 4 years old, it still perfectly describes the area here.  

https://www.minnpost.com/stroll/2013/09/river-beaches-are-caught-between-minneapolis-conflicting-views-about-mississippi
 The article's author had his views on swimming in the river too. But that was in 2013.  "Not everyone in Minneapolis is a river beach person, though. River beaches are an oddball country cousin to the lake beaches. They're a little scrappier, a little less recreational, a little more hard-edged. For one, no one’s swimming. Almost everything about the Mississippi is too dangerous for swimming – if the currents don’t get you, the mercury and polychlorinated biphenyl will. The waterways along the stretch of the Mississippi River between St. Anthony Falls and the Ford Dam are generally considered “impaired.” It’s pretty common to see people recreationally fishing in the river, but it’s rare to see anyone splashing around."

A couple of days later I was on the other side of the river trying to figure out how to get down to White Sands Beach.  White sand and steep just like it looked from the St. Paul side of the river just days ago.

Someone had been picking up garbage but had not taken it back up top yet. The beach was reasonably clean but you can always find more stuff.

I picked up a bag or two and carried my haul back to a Park and Rec barrel before heading home.