Drew M. Ross is the author of Becoming the Twin Cities: Swindles, Schemes, and Enduring Rivalries (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2025). He lives near the gorge in Desnoyer Park and spends his free time on the trails and water. The views expressed are his own.
Between St. Anthony Falls and Fort Snelling, locks and dams have thwarted the Mississippi River’s free flow for over a century. Now that their maintenance costs the public more than they benefit us, we’re in the multi-year process of deciding whether all of the dams, which keep the river at artificially high levels, should be removed.
The return of a wild, free-flowing Mississippi sounds appealing. Currently, the river gorge is largely off-limits unless you have a boat, and even then it’s not ideal for exploring. The channel for now-extinct barge traffic has already begun to refill with sand; outside of the channel are huge limestone boulders that were removed during its dredging. That the old channel could be reconstructed, creating a water park for boating and tubing, according to John Anfinson, former superintendent of the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area. In the heat of the summer, at low water, much of the gorge could be transformed into an accessible park…