Falling Leaves Full Moon Walk at Coldwater Springs – Thursday, October 17, 2024
Inbox
Falling Leaves Full Moon Walk at Sacred Coldwater Springs
Thursday, October 17, 2024
Gather at the park entrance, 7pm
Park on the Hwy 55 access road
One fall day (before the National Park Service clearcut Coldwater in 2011) I was walking up the hill from the reservoir and my footsteps were so loud through the fallen leaves. Coldwater is blessedly quiet and I was crunching, crunching my way sounding audibly oversized. Something at the top of the rise caught my eye—a multi-point deer.
I’m talking Mister Stag! Ut-oh, my pulse lept. Mister Stag glanced at me like I was a fly and kept straight downhill following a pretty little white-tailed doe whose tail flapping left a scent some minutes ago.
Minnesota’s deer rut runs from about late October to early December. In preparation sometimes you can hear younger stags practicing clashing horns together, as in teenaged roughhousing.
S.J.
Coldwater flowed about 144,000 gallons per day before the Highway 55 reroute in the 1990s, down to about 66,000 gpd now. 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 ancestor 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 6:23 pm (55-minutes earlier than last full moon)
Moonrise 7:18 pm (55-minutes earlier than last month)
10-hours, 40-minutes of daylight (1-hour, 16-minutes less than last month)
Moment of the full moon: 6:26 am
Raindrops take 8 minutes traveling at 14.5 mph to reach Earth from 10,000 feet.
Snowflakes take 75 minutes at 1.5 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.