Down the Mississippi to Sportsman's Island

The river has always been a backdrop.

As I kid, I spent many happy hours exploring the river bottoms and islands in the Mississippi River valley south of St. Cloud. During my teenage years, this environment taught me about nature, photography, and why it’s a bad idea to traipse through a patch of stinging nettles while wearing shorts. I attended high school in sight of the river and went to college along its oak-crowned banks. Through spring floods, summer dry spells, and winter’s ice, the Mississippi has always been there. And it always will be, part of the comfort of returning home when so much else in the world is ever changing.

So it seemed appropriate, even if not consciously so, that this should be the place of the first river kayak expedition with my wife. My parents had invited Jenni and me to their St. Cloud home for a Fourth of July barbecue, which sounded good, provided we could work in a real paddling adventure. So we hauled the kayaks along with us; my dad agreed to run us up to St. Cloud and drop us off along the river. We'd kayak several miles south and land at my parents' house in time for lunch.

The Fourth was as perfect a summer day as we can imagine here in Minnesota. Blue sky flecked with cottony puffs of cloud, 80 degrees, and a light breeze. I was doubly looking forward to the trip: It was the first real paddling expedition Jenni and I had embarked upon this year, and it was through a stretch of the river I knew well, yet had never navigated by water.

The drop-off point was Wilson Park - site of St. Cloud's annual Fourth of July fireworks display - where we put in at the Mississippi boat launch. After a thorough daubing of sunscreen, we paddled away from the dock and inlet and onto the river itself.

The athletic field of my high school passed on our right, but we hugged the high left bank. Kayaking is more interesting when you're closer to the shore. Downtown St. Cloud's three bridges came into view, bridges I know well but had never seen from this perspective. We passed several docks with moored pontoon boats along the shore - who knew there were docks here! - and then began our dizzying pass underneath the massive railroad bridge that connected the east St. Cloud with the rail yards on the west side of town. Veterans Bridge carrying St. Germain Street was next, with the rumble of unseen traffic above our heads.

Farther along, we paused to investigate the gaping maw of a storm sewer pipe along the shore. Chilly air poured out of blackness, and steam rose from the outlet. I couldn't help but wonder: How far back underground does the pipe go? Has anyone ever explored it? Would anyone dare?

As we passed downtown, DeSoto Bridge loomed ahead. This bridge, carrying State Highway 23 across the river, was the most major of the city's Mississippi road crossings, carrying 31,000 vehicles a day. Was is the key word. As we approached, the bridge was eerily quiet. It was closed by the state in March after bridge inspectors discovered some bending in its gusset plates. If you're a Minnesotan, you know the term "gusset plates" well: It was these metal plates, which bolt multiple girders together, that failed on the I-35W bridge in downtown Minneapolis nearly a year ago, causing its collapse. In the hyper-sensitive infrastructure environment that has followed, no bridge is above scrutiny. When inspectors found the bending gusset plate issue on the St. Cloud bridge - a fracture-critical bridge similar in design to the 35W bridge - they closed it, for good as it would turn out. It's scheduled to be replaced in 2009, with work starting just a couple of months from now.

So it was a little strange to be paddling underneath this black metal behemoth, knowing that I had walked and biked across it many times, but soon it would exist no more.

Jenni was getting impatient with my frequent stops for picture-taking, so I stowed the camera as the doomed DeSoto Bridge receded behind us. We made good time along the tall, wooded banks of the river. St. Cloud State University - our alma mater - slid by atop the far bank. By now, University Bridge was in sight as we could hear the distant rush of falling water...the St. Cloud Dam.

We pulled out of the river just upstream from the bridge. Eroded portage steps marked the landing at the edge of Munsinger Gardens. Anticipating turbulent waters ahead, I stowed my camera in the watertight forward hold of my kayak and we portaged around the dam.

Getting in was not as friendly as getting out. We had to carry the kayaks down a steep slope of rocky riprap to reach the river. Though very little water was going over most of the dam, the top gate had been lowered along the section closest to us, kicking up a narrow-but-fast current not far from shore. In contrast to the lake-like feel of the pool above the dam, here the water was fast moving and wavy.

We launched and were quickly carried downstream, past just-submerged rocks and through riffles. The most expedient route would have been to stick to the main channel, but we were in the mood to explore and headed to a side channel, one of many among the Beaver Islands. Zebulon Pike had explored these same channels 200 years earlier.

In some places, the water was only a few inches deep and our paddles scraped bottom...but the ride was fast. When I commented on the "rapids," Jenni corrected me: "These aren't rapids. Rapids have a drop." Oh...well, waves and rocks or whatever you want to call them were plenty exciting.

And then we ran aground. We were among the islands now, at the juncture of a couple of channels. Just that fast, the bottom came up to within a couple of inches of the surface, and with a gravelly crunch, we were stuck. We had to push off the bottom to get moving again, only to run aground a short distance later. We hopped out of the kayaks and walked down the channel for 50 yards, debating whether to continue or to try floating again. When another party of a canoe and two kayaks passed on the channel ahead, we opted to float.

The river was full of boulders here. The current picked up. Ahead, I could see a distinct line among the boulders of the river: a drop. Hello, rapids. It was just a few inches, thankfully, and with a little paddling, the kayaks slid right over it. Then another small drop, this time with waves beyond. By now, I'd recognized the "V" formed by fast current between rocks, so I aimed for it and sliced through the choppy water.

Wow. Crap that was exciting. This wasn't even Class I whitewater, and I was already sufficiently thrilled. I was also beginning to see that while our lovely long kayaks were great for tracking on a windy and wavy lake, they weren't adept at maneuvering around rocks in the swift, shallow currents of the Mississippi. Not at all like a canoe. This was confirmed a short time later when I took submerged rock head-on and felt it slide underneath me along the hull. Scraaape. Cringe.

We rejoined the main river and paddled across the channel, aiming upstream because of the current. It was a bizarre sensation, like going forward and backward at the same time. My stomach wrenched and I felt a wave of seasickness ripple through my body. Thankfully, it passed quickly.

Across the main channel, we turned into another shallow reach, this one a calm backwater, and paddled upstream. Foot-long carp darted away from the shadows of our boats as we passed. Around a bend, an extraordinary sight: the bridge to Sportsman's Island. This intriguing place had once been a park - my dad and his siblings had vague memories of going there as children in the late 1950s or early ’60s. Sometime later, perhaps the ’70s, the park was closed, abandoned for reasons unknown.

The rusting truss bridge connecting the island to the shore still stands, but its deck long ago fell apart and daylight shines through portions of the severely rusted girders. Jenni and I pulled up next to the bridge, carefully stepped around poison ivy, and climbed up the bank to the island.

There, we found the hulk of a decades-old car, grass growing through the engine compartment. Several rusting metal buildings stood watch over an open area. One, with old refrigerators and freezers and a few wide windows, we deduced to be a concessions building. Another was obviously a picnic shelter. A backstop rose out of waist-high grass, overlooking an empty field where a baseball diamond had been. There was even a rusty merry-go-round, still capable of spinning despite its disheveled condition.

Exploring these remains, I couldn't help but feel like we were seeing the leftovers of a bombed-out civilization. What happened to Sportsman's Island? As Jenni said, “This would be such a neat place for a park today.” Why wasn't this prime locale still open for recreation? What caused it to be abandoned so hastily?

We'll likely never know.

We tiptoed around the poison ivy and put the boats back in the water. More carp fled, leaving puffs of sediment beneath the surface. Soon we were back on the main river; a half hour later we were passing Putnam's Island, a place I'd explored on foot many of times. Around a bend, we cut into a shallow side channel, then turned upstream to land at the shore below my parents' home.

Every fireworks show has a grand finale. So did our Fourth of July adventure:
hauling two 17-foot, 63-pound kayaks up 70 feet of baking hot sand bank covered with prickly junipers. And that, not the paddling itself, is why I was sore for the rest of the weekend.

Look for a photo gallery of our little river ramble on GunflintToElyCanoe.com later this week.