6-Foot Indian Grass Full Moon Walk at Coldwater Springs – Monday, August 19, 2024
6-Foot Indian Grass Full Moon Walk at Sacred Coldwater Springs
Monday, August 19, 2024
Gather at the park entrance, 7pm
Park on the Hwy 55 access road
The Indian grasses at Coldwater Park are over 6-feet tall. There is a wall of prairie grass topped by fountains of grass seedheads. All this wonderful rain has nourished the green people to explode skyward.
Indian grass roots can reach down 12-feet holding the soil in place despite the thundering rain bombs that have been flooding streets and eroding creek banks. Drought is no longer an item in our news. Rabbits and Coldwater’s deer herd are fattening up on the lush grasses.
Originally vegetation along the Mississippi River was Big Woods. Prairie began south and west of the river but the National Park Service clearcut Coldwater Park in 2011, brought in tons of dirt fill and seeded fast growing prairie plants to hold the soil because it was a cheap, fast way to hide construction scars.
The park service wants to encourage prairie grasses and uses fire to kill emergent trees. Climate crisis scientists urge massive tree planting since trees make oxygen. In the trees versus grasses battle in the end nature will win.
Friends of Coldwater are grateful that this ancient spring still flows although down from 144,000 gallons per day before the Highway 55 reroute in the 1990s to about 66,000 gpd. Water is what climate change is all about: floods, droughts, warming oceans and extreme weather that makes the daily news.
Coldwater is an acknowledged Dakota sacred site. Friends of Coldwater seek to honor our 11,000-year-old landscape and the people whose dust we stand upon. So we return and return to remember the spirits that feed this Indigenous sacred place.
Full moon walks have been celebrated at Coldwater Springs each month since 2000. Traditional group howl when the moon peeks out.
Sunset 8:51 pm (40-minutes earlier than last full moon)
Moonrise 8:34 pm (1-hour and 5-minutes earlier than last month)
13-hours, 52-minutes of daylight
Moment of the full moon: 1:26 pm
Raindrops take 8 minutes traveling at 14.5 mph to reach Earth from 10,000 feet.
DIRECTIONS: Coldwater Springs is between Minnehaha Park & Fort Snelling, in Minneapolis, just north of the Hwy 55/62 interchange. From Hwy 55/Hiawatha, turn East (toward the Mississippi) at 54th Street, take an immediate right, & drive all the way down the frontage road where you can park at the pay meters.
Gather at the cul-de-sac, which is the Coldwater Park entrance.
Free. All welcome.
#FullMoonWalk #FullMoon #ColdwaterSprings #MinneapolisNature