Minnehaha Falls

Minnehaha Creek carries water from Lake Minnetonka and the Minneapolis lakes on a winding journey across the city, and near its end it reaches Minnehaha Falls. There the creek pours over a lip of hard limestone about fifty-three feet down into a plunge pool, then continues through a deepening gorge to the Mississippi. The waterfall is fed entirely by that creek, so its power rises and falls with the rain and snowmelt, thundering in spring and slowing in a dry late summer.

The falls sit within Minnehaha Regional Park, established in the late nineteenth century as one of the first parks in the city and long a favorite gathering place. A trail leads from the overlook at the top down stairs into the gorge, where visitors can stand near the base of the falls and follow the creek downstream through the shaded ravine all the way to the great river.

The word Minnehaha comes from the Dakota language and describes the falls and the creek. It is often loosely translated as 'laughing water,' but that rendering came from Longfellow and later writers rather than from the Dakota themselves, and the truer sense refers to the waterfall and its rushing water. This land is the homeland of the Dakota people, whose name for the country, Mni Sota Makoce, meaning the land where the waters reflect the skies, gave Minnesota its name.

In 1855 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published The Song of Hiawatha, a long narrative poem that used Native names and settings and gave one of its central characters the name Minnehaha. The poem was enormously popular, and it fixed the name Minnehaha in the national imagination and turned the falls into a destination. Longfellow drew on published descriptions and images of the falls without ever visiting them, an odd twist for a place his words made famous.

Below the falls the creek has carved a gorge into ancient limestone and sandstone, rock laid down when this region lay beneath shallow seas hundreds of millions of years ago. The trail through the gorge passes rock walls and shaded hollows before opening onto the Mississippi River, and the whole ravine is a cool, green refuge from the surrounding city streets.

The wider park is a landscape of old hardwoods, formal gardens, statues, and picnic grounds, connected by trail to the Mississippi River corridor and, upstream, to the Minneapolis Chain of Lakes. It is part of the city's celebrated park and trail system, so a visit to the falls can extend into a long walk or bike ride along the river or the creek. Statues in the park, including one of Hiawatha carrying Minnehaha, nod to the poem that made the place famous.

Spring is the falls at their loudest, swollen with snowmelt and rain, and the gorge greens up quickly. Summer brings warm days, full shade in the ravine, and the park's gardens in bloom, a popular time for picnics and strolls. Both seasons are ideal for walking down into the gorge and along the creek to the river.

Fall paints the hardwoods gold and red above the water, a beautiful and quieter time to visit. Winter is the falls' most dramatic transformation: as the creek slows and freezes, the waterfall builds into towers, curtains, and cones of ice that draw photographers and cold-weather visitors. The paths turn icy then, so footing matters, but the frozen falls are one of the signature winter sights of Minneapolis.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.