Continuing on our tour of the Mississippi River Recreation Area and Refuge, today we attempted Hidden Falls and Crobsy Farm. When we got down the hill to the parking area, I realized we had been there before but only to see the River, not the falls.
We headed north on the trail towards where the map I had looked at said would lead to the falls but we did not get very far before the trail was under water. It was not particularly warm so nobody wanted to take their shoes off. We ran into a couple guys coming down a different trail and asked them where it led. They said a “bridge and stuff” so we headed inland. We saw some new flowers, fungus and a good toad but ended up back in the parking lot – no bridge, no falls. We resolved to come back later in the season to check again on the regular path.
We headed downstream instead and encountered more flooding after more heavy rains.
When we stopped for a snack, I found an interesting side trail so we decided to go up. There were cool mushrooms at the bottom but it was very steep and difficult to climb, in part because of loose rocks and little to hold on to.
We basically got stuck at the top because of this rock face, which we could not get up or around. You can see how small the ledge was under Gloria’s feet. Everyone was mad at me for getting them up there and they were not looking forward to the trip down. It was, admittedly, pretty dicey, but only a few scraped hands and other very minor bumps and bruised resulted.
After that, we had a quiet picnic lunch on flat ground by the river! We headed out of the park, and on a little whim I decided to go upriver on the boulevard because I had seen an overlook marked on the map. I thought we might be able to see Hidden Falls from here since we could not get up from the mouth of the stream. We found the overlook … and looked over to see the OLD overlook and then Katie discovered a trail down from there so we went offroading again. It was probably about as steep as the other foray up but it was a much better trail. A few days later, we realized Gloria had likely rubbed up against some sort of itchy plant here because she ended up with a scratchy rash that needed prescription treatment. We saw more flowers and interesting trees going down into the creek valley.
When we got down to the bottom, we discovered this great little stream and headed up. I stepped in because I still had on my “adventure shoes” that are fine getting wet. I noticed the water was much colder than the river and Lake Minnetonka, making me think it was spring fed (which I verified later on the internet). As we moved up, we saw that the banks had been reinforced. I had read that the park was WPA-era so this matched what we were seeing. It was very much like what Minnehaha Falls Park looked like before much of had been renovated.
After just a few minutes trekking, we found the falls! We passed a staircase coming down to the falls (again clearly WPA built based on the construction and materials) on the path and had a little chuckle about that since we had come a more roundabout way!
Of course, people had to see if they could get to the top with Katie in the lead. If Juliana had been with us, she probably would have wanted to see what was in the tunnel going under the boulevard above!
After the commotion on my adventure trail, there were surprisingly not particularly shook up by this ledge walk, maybe because it looked different up there!
We hung around a little longer and looked at the pool where the falls landed, the moss and rocks. It was damp and buggy so we moved back down the trail.
After going back down the creek (not up the stairs as I had hoped) and up the adventure trail to the parking lot, we got in the van and went downriver toward Crosby Farm Park and Watergate Marina. Everyone was pretty pooped out by this time but I just wanted to go look quick. Crosby Farm park was flooded and honestly the swampy back waters smelled terrible! However, we drove past this door in the cliff across from the marina and with the magic of a smartphone and a data plan, found out that it was a very large cave that had been last used as boat storage and other interesting things previously. I thought there might be something interesting about it because it has a US Postal mailbox out front. What kind of cave has an address??
After getting home, I looked up more info on the caves and checked out some library books so we can incorporate cave tours into future trips in the area. This was a great trip and I know we will want to visit Hidden Falls again.
