Midsummer Full Moon Walk at Sacred Coldwater Springs
Sunday, July 21, 2024
Gather at the park entrance, 7pm
Park on the Hwy 55 access road
The first part of summer, up to Summer Solstice exactly one month ago, was rain. We got so much rain the year’s-long drought was erased. If you expected excess rainwater ponding at Coldwater Park—well, no.
Coldwater sported vertical ponding. The green people slurped-up all that wetness in knee-to-waste tall vegetation so thick you couldn’t see or walk through it. In the 31-years I’ve been captivated by this sacred water/land it’s never looked so thick, like a green sea. Solid.
I remember the day in 1993 I happened on this site and stopped, gapped at Coldwater reservoir and the old limestone Spring House. It was a scene from a storybook of olden days, a dreamscape of great forests with hidden ponds and stone towers. “What place is this,” I heard myself say. Coldwater grabbed me by the heart. —S.J.
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 ancestor and the people whose dust we stand upon. So we return and return to remember the spirits that feed this Indigenous sacred site.
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 (12-minutes earlier than last full moon)
Moonrise 9:39 pm (9-minutes later than last month)
15-hours, 5-minutes of daylight
Moment of the full moon: 5:17 am
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.