Just a short walk over to the river (Mississippi) this morning, to check out the local flooding. The buildings in the background are on the East Bank campus of the University of Minnesota.
What looks like a thick curb across the photo about a third of the distance from the top, is actually the top of the retaining wall. On the other side of the wall is the river, full of foam and debris, flowing fast. On this side of the wall, if you look close, you can see ducks paddling on the road and/or bike path. The water has gone down a bit, as you can tell by the debris left behind on the road.
Yes…and no… Many years the river does flood in the Twin CIties in the Spring, but not necessarily every year. It all depends on getting the particular combination of the amount of snow, how much moisture is in the snow, how deep the ground is frozen, and how fast the snow melts in the Spring. And this year there was record-breaking snowfall. Naturally the snow has to go somewhere when it melts, and if it can’t go into the ground, of course, it goes into the streams, then into the tributaries, then into the mighty Mississippi.
I can’t remember if the spot in the photo today typically floods or not (when we do have flooding). I hardly ever go that way anymore—when I worked in downtown Mpls I biked on that path daily for my commute, but it’s been 14 years now since that job ended.
Much of the low-lying land along the river here in the Cities is parkland, so roads and recreational trails get flooded, but you don’t hear about devastating loss of homes and businesses like in other places. As far as the trails, my favorite places to ride that I’ve posted pics of are flooded now, and it will take time for the river to go down, things to dry out, and eventually they’ll bulldoze the debris and mud off the paved trails. Probably for the next two months or so, I’ll be keeping to the high roads (though I don’t promise to stay on the straight and narrow )
Interesting. We have an area that floods pretty regularly, because of how Alabama Power regulates the dam. Water comes up 12-15 feet, sometimes 20, and goes into a parking lot and other areas
The name ‘Minnehaha’ comes from the Dakota, not Ojibwe, language. It can be divided into two separate words in the Dakota language, ‘mni’ meaning ‘water’ and ‘haha’ meaning ‘waterfall’ and when put together, ‘mnihaha’ (its English translation, ‘Minnehaha’ ) means ‘water waterfall ’.
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Beth Brown, Dakota speaker and program coordinator of the Agindaasodaa! (Let’s Read!) program at the Division of Indian Work, attributes this mistranslation to a misunderstanding of the Dakota language,
“Besides the fact that ‘haha’ resembles the English ‘haha’, used to represent the sound of laughter, the idea of ‘laughing waters’ may be related to the fact that ‘haha’ and ‘iha’, the Dakota word for ‘smile’ or ‘laugh,’ both have the same root word ‘ha’, which means ‘to curl’,” Brown said. “So, ‘haha’ is describing the way the water curls beneath a waterfall, and the word ‘iha’ describes the curl of the lips when we laugh or smile.”
ETA for formatting in the quotes, to include italicization as it was in the original.
That’s cool. Hereabouts, the Muscogee Creek language gives words for a bunch of bodies of water. So, “hahacha” is “river” in Muscogee, and we get Buttahatchee (River of Sumacs) and Choctawhachee (River of the Choctaws), Waksahatchee ()River of the Waksa clan), etc.
By the way, if you’ve ever read the urban fantasy novel War for the Oaks, which is set in Minneapolis, the battles of the Faeries take place at the Falls.
A short hike through some historical sites. Starting at an overgrown hill fort that was inhabited around 500-1000 AD, its cleared hilltop visible bottom center:
Finally, up a hill to a pre-Christian burial ground with barrows, more recently turned into a bit of an open-air museum with reproductions of old marked stones from various locations around Lithuania.
Last 6 months: 12,000 miles, somewhere around 43 states. South from Maine to TN and GA, then Florida, New Orleans, gulf coast, Austin, Phoenix, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, home via Chicago and Cleveland.
Yup, I’ve been in Chicago this past weekend for my last concert of the season (and to celebrate my daughter’s birthday) and lo-&-behold, the tulips have awoken!
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