A rapids renewed

GRANITE FALLS, MINN. – As I studied the frothing waters just below the municipal hydropower plant in this bucolic southwestern Minnesota farm town, I started to worry.

With recent rainfalls, this stretch of the Minnesota River had entered flood stage. The torrent looked like too much for a canoe laden with fishing tackle, camping gear and a couple of middle-aged guys from Minneapolis.

I had asked Peter Kohlsaat, a dentist and cartoonist, to join me on this two-day excursion because he is good company and, more vitally, an experienced helmsman. Once Kohlsaat surveyed the rough waters below the hydro dam, he rendered a sober verdict: "Let's look for somewhere to put in downriver."

After poking around town, we found an easy point of disembarkation at War Memorial Park. The current was mellow near the shore but, as we moved toward the center of the river, it quickened. I gawked as we briskly passed a half-dozen American white pelicans clustered atop a boulder pile. It was the first of many of the magnificent and enormous birds — once extirpated from the state, now recovering — that we would encounter on our 30-mile paddle.

While I enjoy a feel-good ornithological interlude as much as the next guy, the pelicans were not the reason I came to explore the Minnesota. I wanted to see something even more sublime: what a river looks like when it is reborn.

For more than a century, most of the three-mile reach below the hydro plant at Granite Falls was less a river than a lake. That changed this winter when Xcel Energy removed an obsolete 600-foot-long, 14.5-foot high dam at Minnesota Falls. It was the biggest dam removed in Minnesota in the past three decades and, possibly, ever.

After crews dredged out the vast deposits of sediment that had accumulated above the dam, an ancient complex of bedrock and boulders — stuff that had been entombed for more than a century — was once again exposed.

For fish and fisherman, this is very good news. Rapids serve to oxygenate water, creating precisely the sort of vital habitat that is in short supply on the muddy and meandering Minnesota. In electro-fishing surveys, DNR crews have discovered that many native fish species have already returned to the long blocked-off reach. Biologists expect the rapids will eventually attract spawning lake sturgeon and paddlefish — some of our strangest, largest and most ancient fishes — from as far away as the Mississippi River.

For canoeists, these new/old rapids offer a more immediate pleasure: the prospect of some exhilarating paddling.

As we pushed deeper into the valley, eventually all we could hear was the sound of water rushing over rocks. We were zipping when we hit the resurrected rapids but, because the water was so high, we floated easily over most of the rocks.

In the fastest stretch, we ran a steep chute and, at the bottom, plowed into a big standing wave. I was sure the water would breach the sides of the canoe and, instinctively, grasped at the gunwales. In so doing, I committed the cardinal error of the bowman — not paddling enough to keep the canoe facing downriver. We promptly spun around 180 degrees. Dumb luck spared us a capsizing.

As the river and my nerves calmed, I took a closer look at our surroundings. Evidence of civilization had almost entirely receded. Towering cottonwoods, elms and silver maples hugged the shore. Countless trees were in the water, too, toppled from the steep, constantly eroding banks that are one of the river's hallmarks.

We soon encountered several granite outcrops along the shore. Known as "gneiss outcrops," they are among the oldest visible rocks on the planet. I was surprised to see a healthy clump of junipers and firs growing from the fissures in one specimen that rose impressively from the river in a sheer wall 15 feet high. It looked like a scene out of the Boundary Waters, not the heart of the farm country.

As evening approached, we started scouting for a place to camp and fish. Eventually, we found a suitable-looking clearing atop a high patch of dry ground, where we pitched tents and ate dinner in utter seclusion. Around dusk, I set up a catfishing rig, using a heavily weighted line and a circle hook baited with chicken liver. The tried and true approach yielded five nice-size channel catfish.

The easy fishing was enhanced by a curious fact. Despite recent rains and the lack of a breeze, the mosquitoes were sparse — a pale imitation of the hordes I have encountered on so many summertime excursions in northern Minnesota. Our float through the Corn Belt was different from the typical Up North outing in another regard: It offered far more solitude.

In our first day on the water, we encountered just a handful of visible structures and a total of four people. The next morning, we paddled a few more hours to our takeout spot at Vicksburg County Park. On the way, we passed more beautiful vistas, more pelicans, rapids, rock outcroppings — and not a single human being.

Mike Mosedale is a freelance journalist and longtime Minneapolis resident.