Bassett Creek Chronicle

 

Bassett Creek meanders for roughly twelve miles  from Medicine Lake, in the suburb of Plymouth, through mostly residential sections of Crystal and Golden Valley, before entering Minneapolis, where it trickles through Theodore Wirth Park and along the edge of the Bryn Mar neighborhood, through a wooded valley past the derelict Glenwood Springs Water Company and Utepil's Brewery and Tap Room. 

For the last two miles it ceases to be a creek, the flow being carried by an underground tunnel that enters into the Mississippi River downstream from the St. Anthony Locks. Evidently the large tunnel you see issuing into the Mississippi just south of Plymouth Avenue, which I had always presumed was the  mouth of Bassett Creek, is no longer connected to it. I discovered my error just the other day while reading a profile of Bassett Creek in the Mill City Times .

Inglewood Spring on Bassett Creek (1894)

The historical information in the article was interesting and the vintage photos were fascinating, but I couldn't help noticing that the data was out-of-date and the conclusion wildly inaccurate. The author, Michael Rainville, Jr.,  writes: "The story of Bassett’s Creek should be seen as an example of how destructive and disruptive humans can be to nature. We are fortunate to not have many stories with sad endings."

Rainville doesn't seem to be aware that the Bassett Creek Water Management Commission has been cleaning up the creek for half a century and more.

One of three lagoons in Wirth Park on Bassett Creek

I happen to live not far from the creek, and I've watched them move boulders, lay underground tunnels, install long rolls of straw with willow saplings embedding in them along the banks, and in other ways improve the integrity of the creek bed and cut down on erosion.

A look at the commission's website reveals that at the moment there are twenty-five capital improvement projects in the works within the Bassett Creek Watershed. One that excites me in particular is a proposal to dredge the sediment that has accumulated in the lagoons along the creek in Theodore Wirth Park between Golden Valley Road and Trunk Highway 55. I was not aware until I read the proposal that the lagoons were created in the mid-1930s by CCC crews; I presume they used shovels.

A recent study found that large amounts of sediment didn't start to accumulate until the early 1990s. I wonder why? Nowadays what used to be a lovely body of water is usually a big mudflat, often covered with weeds, though further upstream, in what I like to call the Bassett Creek Gorge, a gurgling brook rushes down across the stones at all times of the year.

I've been measuring the water quality of the creek for the DNR for seven or eight years now as part of their Citizen Stream Monitoring Program. This is not a big deal. I drive down maybe twenty times during the summer, throw my yellow plastic bucket over the railing of the stone bridge—also probably the work of the CCC—and jiggle the rope until the bucket starts taking in water. Then I haul up the bucket and pour the water into a long, clear plastic tube, which allows me to determine how dirty or clean the water is.

It was only this summer, after years spent hoisting several gallons of water, time and again, up from the creek, that I discovered, by chance, what should have occurred to me all along: I do not need a full bucket of water to fill the tube. Two inches in the bottom of the bucket will be plenty.

Though passers-by seldom take an interest in what I'm doing, I occasionally meet someone interesting at the bridge. One early morning, with the dew still on the grass, it was a man photographing dragon-flies. One sultry evening it was a man who'd moved here from India with his wife. He was pondering the meaning of the word "chitta."

"What is chitta?" I asked. "Is it like "chi"?

"No, it's a division of the mind. Hard to explain."

 Hilary was with me that evening, and the three of us got in to a lively discussion of "chitta," consciousness, perception, and other concepts. I don't recall that we arrived at any conclusions, but I do remember how golden the light was that evening.

Just the other day I was taking a reading when a group of school kids came by. "What are you doing?" one of them asked. So I told her. Then I pointed out the big carp that was moving slowly upstream. That got them excited. The counselors finally arrived and one of them said, "Oh, you've got a turbidity tube. I used one of those in environmental class." She didn't sound too excited about it.

Then she said, "Come on, kids."

As they were leaving one little girl said, "That looks like a koi to me."

"Same thing," I said. "It's the same fish .... though koi are prettier."   

The view from the bridge

Anatomy of a Field Trip

Several people we know are interested to hear about the places we've been visiting. "We should get out and do something like that," they say. And I think they mean it.

The foray we took today might serve as a good example of how such things get done.

It started last night, when Hilary said, "We're free tomorrow. We should go somewhere."

She sprained her ankle a few days ago on the tennis court, so we decided to go to Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge, an hour north of town. Why? Because you can see a lot of countryside on their six-mile drive without doing too much walking. And there are a few short trails here and there, too.  

But we've been to Sherburne two or three times already in the last few months, and this morning Hilary said, "What about Crex Meadows?"

An even better idea. A longer drive (maybe ninety minutes) but once you turn off the freeway at Forest Lake the route gets pretty scenic. Trouble is, the longer drive would mean that we'd spend the best part of the morning in the car, and there aren't as many places at Crex to get out and hike.

A riverside path at Wild River State Park

"Maybe we should stop at Wild River State Park on the way up," I suggested. "We haven't been there in years. Then we could go to the Scandinavian Bakery in Lindstrom and get some donuts."

More trouble: though Wild River State Park and Crex Meadows aren't that far from each other as the crow flies, it would take almost an hour to get from one to the other, due to the paucity of bridges across the St. Croix River.

So we decided to limit ourselves to Wild River, get the donuts on the way, and have lunch at the drive-in north of Taylors Falls on the way home.

We left at 7:30. The sky was blue, the roads were uncrowded, the air was cool and clear, the lakes were calm, and there were quite a few fisherman out already. From the window of a car the Chisago chain of lakes looked like a Grandma Moses painting on a jigsaw puzzle.

We parked a few blocks from the bakery in Lindstrom, put on our masks, and were immediately taken by a wooden picnic basket and some wicker chairs in the front window of an antique store on Main Street. I don't know why. There was beauty and nostalgia in the air, I guess. I took one look at a caroms board in the window and was reminded of Hilary's uncle Skidmore, a Honeywell lawyer who took childish delight in caroms, skittles, and other old-fashioned wooden games. I looked at the white enameled tin coffee-pot and thought of my mom, who could make egg coffee with the best of the Swedes—my dad was second-generation Swedish—but was more at home making corned beef and cabbage.

I did a little research on the Lindstrom Bakery before we left. The woman who runs it, Bernie Coulombe, started working there 48 years ago. "It was love at first sight," she told a reporter for City Pages a few years ago. "The owner fell in love with me ... and I fell in love with the bakery." The two were married and ran the bakery together for more than four decades. When her husband died, Bernie carried on alone. Now she does all the baking herself, though a helper comes in to run the cash register in the mornings.

I went inside alone—Covid etiquette—prepared to buy a cake donut and a crispy for Hilary and whatever I wanted for myself. A woman was completing her purchase at the register, and a middle-aged man with a Dennis Wilson haircut came in behind me.  He said something chipper, and Bernie replied, "I baked for two graduations and a wedding yesterday. Last night I got the ovens going at 11. I've been up all night. The Fourth of July is on a Saturday, and I'm closed!"

She wasn't complaining, just planning ahead. (Fourth of July is still a week away.)

The "Scandinavian" donuts, she told me, were on the left side of the display case. There were four tiers, and I ordered one of each. Then the crispy. I was tending toward a cinnamon roll but lurched at the last second in the direction of the apple crispy fold-over. And of course I had to get a dozen Russian teacakes. I'd grabbed a loaf of limpa caraway rye when I came into the shop.

Nothing was priced.

"Is that all?" she said. I couldn't tell if she was tired, exasperated, or was just spooked by my mask. Hilary and I were the only ones in town wearing them, though mine was a good Scandinavian mask—blue and yellow plaid.   

Grand total: $9.50.

The park was still lush and shadowy when we got there. Within sixty seconds of stepping out of the car, we'd identified seven or eight birds by song. At this time you seldom see them, but you often hear them.

We hiked along the river through field and forest from the visitors center (closed) to the Nevers Dam site and beyond. Butterflies, dragonflies, wildflowers, and birds singing everywhere. 

My favorite stretch followed along the river through some open fields. That's where we had our one great sighting: an orchard oriole. (Many years we don't see a single one.) And on the way back to the car we got an excellent and extended sighting of an ovenbird. Often heard, seldom seen at this time of year.

Before leaving we drove through the campground to check out the loops for future reference. (Site number 8 looks good.) But our lunch at the Taylors Falls Drive-in was not to be. When we pulled in, a young man wearing a mask, came out to tell us that one of the employees had tested positive for Covid and the place would be closed for at least a week.

Well, that was too bad. For the employee especially, less so for us. After all, we had a loaf of fresh limp bread in the back seat and a quart of herring in the fridge back home. The lesson being, in travel (as in life) never get your heart too firmly set on any one thing.

We returned home without a wicker chair or a carom board but with a waxed paper bag full of Russian tea cakes, a few ideas for further exploration in the area (the Almelund Antique Threshing Show in early August? Probably not.) and a modified birding wish list. OK, we've seen the dickcissel and the orchard oriole. Now how about a black-billed cuckoo? And where are all the scarlet tanagers? 

Glacial Ridge Adventure

The idea was to get out of town for a few days and explore some of the most beautiful landscapes Minnesota has to offer—the ones in Pope, Swift, and Kandiyohi Counties.

What? Come again?

Clearly, I'm not talking about the Boundary Waters or the North Woods here. I'm talking about the Glacial Ridge Trail Scenic Byway, which zigs and zags down gravel roads through grassy hills that don't support marketable crops and have been put into environmental set-aside programs or purchased by the Nature Conservancy. 

The byway passes lakes and sloughs not attractive enough to have been invaded by cottages and second homes but appealing to waterfowl and to the passing connoisseur of landscapes. We saw sheep and cows and horses occasionally, but very little corn.

To get a general idea of the region I'm referring to, just draw a straight line from Sibley State Park (north of Willmar) to Glacial Lakes State Park (south of Starbuck). We reserved a campsite at Sibley for one night and a second one at Glacial Lakes for the following night. According to Google maps, you can get from one park to the other in half an hour. But we followed the "Scenic Byway" signs down a labyrinth of gravel roads, stopping often to admire the scenery, and it took us all morning.

If you're planning to make the trip, I would recommend downloading the Glacial Ridge Scenic Byway brochure. It identifies the various natural and historic sites you'll be passing by and helps to alleviate such anxious existential questions as "What am I doing surrounded by swamps in the middle of nowhere?"

I think we ought to commend whoever published that brochure, which we referred to time and again during the two days we were wandering the prairie countryside. The motive for producing such publications is usually commercial; the ads pay for the printing. But during our tour of the countryside we didn't pass a single car. So perhaps it wasn't money well spent.

Or maybe the weather was keeping tourists away. Winds were gusting to 35 mph, and temperatures crept up into the low nineties.

Little-known fact: high winds make a landscape more attractive, because they create a sense of whirring animation and they also rustle the leaves, which then bulk out, shimmer, and expose their light and sometimes silvery undersides.

A few swans

Another little-known fact: any driving tour becomes more interesting if you're looking for birds. When you come upon a God-forsaken slough thick with mud, you comb the opposite shore with your binoculars—there might be a bittern lurking in the reeds!  You endure a mile of shadowy oak forest by stopping from time to time to listen for the ethereal song of a thrush. And who knows? There might be a scarlet tanager lolling on a branch nearby.

The woods and fields were full of chattering house wrens, redstarts, and yellow warblers. Flocks of soaring pelicans were a common (and majestic) sight, and we saw plenty of trumpeter swans and egrets, too. I had three species on my "hope to see today" list, but only saw one of them: a dicksissel.

Our lone dicksissel

But the chief glory of the glacial ridge country is the landscape itself, shrouded in early-summer green: bare hills covered in a carpet of grasses, ridges thick with oaks, small kettle lakes that look like they were poured into the hollows of the countryside yesterday.

The only person we spoke with during our morning ramble was a young woman just getting into her truck in a parking lot near the side of the road. I pulled in to say "hi" and noticed the lettering on the door of the truck: Nature Conservancy— Arlington VA, Cushing MN.

I mentioned how much we were enjoying the countryside and she agreed wholeheartedly.

"But there doesn't seem to be any easy way to get into these marvelous tracts of land," I said.

"Have you been to the Ordway Prairie Overlook?" she asked.

Ordway Prairie

"We've been there on other occasions," I said. "But I never saw a trail down into it."

"There isn't a formal trail, but you're free to hike anywhere. There are lots of deer trails."

Prairie Woods ELC

Two of the best places to get out into the countryside on foot lie at either end of the route I'm describing. The Prairie Woods Environmental Learning Center, just south of Sibley State Park, offers several miles of trails, and the Kensington Runestone Museum,  a few miles northeast of the town of Kensington itself, has twelve miles of trails through a variety of habitats and also has a small but attractive (and air-conditioned) museum that looks like it was completed only a few weeks ago.

Campsite 30

But the bests trails we took out through the woods and onto the ridges were at the state parks. I had reserved a campsite at Glacial Lakes State Park facing directly out into the fields from alongside the trailhead, and we took a cool morning hike across the countryside. But not before partaking of our early morning coffee, and also chatting with a woman from the DNR who arrived in a silver pick-up truck and stopped by to chat before starting her day. In one hand she held a long tube with a nozzle connected to a plastic tank of herbicides that was hanging off her back.

"What are you two doing up so early?" she said as she approached, addressing us as if we were old friends.

"Best part of the day," I said.

She told us she'd driven down from Brainerd to eradicate some burdock and thistles out on in the fields.

"We've cut down a lot of trees around here," she told us. "Last year, you couldn't even see that slough over there. The ash trees are really on the way out. We're just removing them early."

"Do you use fire?" I asked.

"Oh, we're burning all the time," she said. "But not today, with winds up to 40 mph, and a high in the mid-nineties. It's going to get nasty."

"I hope you've got your tick protection on," I said.

"I have clothes for ticks, but these aren't them," she said. "I've gotten every tick disease there is, up in Brainerd. But there aren't any deer ticks around here."

Park maintenance woman driving through the field

Our hike was one of the highlights of the trip. Winds were already building, the views were fantastic, we could easily have been in Iceland or Wales, but with silos in the distance rather than village church steeples. And the trailside plants looked unusually lush amid the morning shadows.

A clay-colored sparrow

It had been too hot to make a fire the previous evening, but we enjoyed a brief but vigorous chorus from a nearby pack of coyotes as the sun went down and a midnight display of twenty or thirty fireflies scattered around the woods and slough down the hill from our site. The stars were also grand.