Minnehaha and St. Anthony Falls

On Sunday morning after a wonderful breakfast of homemade blueberry pancakes and apple butter, Chris took us on a tour of some of the sights around Minneapolis. The first stop was Minnehaha Falls and the surrounding park. Since we have few waterfalls readily accessible around home, it was really cool to see these falls in the winter. I actually vaguely remember stopping here the first time I was in Minneapolis sometime in the late '60s but only remember the location, no details.

We walked down on the trail to the creek at the base of the falls to do a little more exploring. (No geocaches were found) I guess the falls at this time of year are barely a trickle compared to their summertime flow. There was only a slight breeze so it didn't feel as cold as it did a couple of days ago in St. Paul.

This is the creek at the base and we followed it for a short ways before heading back up the stairs towards the parking lot. I'm still amazed at the lack of snow but I'm not complaining. The weather guessers are saying that it'll be -17°F by next weekend and it was -24°F back home in Fairbanks. Here, it was above freezing with scattered clouds.

 

After Minnehaha Falls, we drove up along the west shore of the Mississippi River. This is on the opposite side from where we were on Thanksgiving Day. We stopped at the Stone Arch Bridge to walk across. This is the bridge I had a picture of yesterday. These buildings are just downstream from St. Anthony Falls. According to the posters, the falls were rapidly deteriorating and instead of allowing them to turn into rapids (falls are more geographically contained) they added concrete to keep it in place.

 

I guess I really like to look of all of the old commercial buildings and warehouses along the river and enjoyed hearing of the history of the area.

These are locks on the west side of the falls. Chris pointed out that this lock is much narrower than the lock at Ford Falls, which are shown in the previous post, to handle smaller boats and barges.

Here are the St. Anthony Falls. Even though these are much larger, I still like the appearance of the Minnehaha Falls and from the drawings of what these fall originally looked like, it was looked more scenic before when it had a nice "U" shape.

After the Stone Arch Bridge, we visited my cousin and his wife for lunch then went to one of Reuben's rehearsals in downtown Minneapolis. It was like getting a private concert as the small group was practicing for an upcoming gig. They sounded pretty good.

On Monday morning we headed to the airport but not before getting at least one photo of Chris in his natural environment. In this case the Ural since "snow pellets" were forecast later in the day. Thank you to Chris and his wife for hosting us for the last couple of days. We thoroughly enjoyed spending the last couple of days with them.

 

This post is was made using Blogsy on the iPad, email from the iPhone, BlogGo on the phone and I finally had to use the browser editor to clean up the mess that all of the apps made. They really don't work together very well.

 

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