10-years of the Coldwater Crew
Written by Anna Waugh, Mississippi Park Connection, Assistant Director
In the spring of 2011, Mni Owe Sni/Coldwater Spring was covered in a dozen or so asbestos-filled buildings, cracked parking lots, and a spring - sacred to many tribal nations.
For more than a decade, the site had been surrounded by a chain-link fence, and had become overgrown with 13 acres of buckthorn. Parking lots were filled with broken glass. A diverse community of people who had fought hard during the reroute of Highway 55 to save the spring was still advocating for it to be revived and restored to protect the spring, which naturally produces 144,000 gallons of water from the earth each day at a consistent 47 degrees.
The National Park Service invited Mississippi Park Connection to work together to bring the landscape back to health. At first, a small group of staff and volunteers came together two times a week to remove buckthorn, pick up trash, and add native plants to the landscape. Dubbed the Coldwater Crew, the group spent most of those days hauling buckthorn. Mounds of the woody, aggressive plant piled high and were transported later to the District Energy Plant in downtown Saint Paul to be used as biofuel to heat the downtown district.
In those days, volunteer crews would regularly find balls of taconite on the ground, left over from the site’s Bureau of Mines days. Several volunteers had worked at the Bureau of Mines, researching moon rocks, precious metals, and iron. Their stories added to the rich layers of Coldwater Spring history.
Within three years, volunteers had given more than 10,000 hours to Mni Owe Sni/Coldwater Spring. To say that the site couldn’t have looked the way it does today without them is not an understatement.
Later, there were investments from REI and Mississippi Park Connection’s members to host large-scale events like National Public Lands Day, where many hands made a tremendous difference over the span of just a few hours.
One of the most amazing transformations on the site is the oak savanna just as you are entering the property. For several decades, the library building of the Bureau of Mines had been sitting on top of a wetland. When the building was in operation, the basement needed a sump pump running throughout the year to keep the floors dry. After the building was removed, and an initial restoration of the wetland was completed by contractors, volunteers spent hundreds of hours removing invasive plants and planting new wetland plants in the natural spring there.
A few years ago, biologists from the Minnesota Wetland Health Evaluation Program (WHEP) measured the health of this wetland and found that it was the cleanest and healthiest in the entire Twin Cities Metropolitan area. Salamanders and frogs live abundantly here.
Many of the Coldwater Crew members have been giving 10+ years of service to the National Park. Their works stands on the shoulders of the many folks who cared for the Spring before the National Park Service came on the scene, including many Dakota community members and the people who advocated for the Spring to be preserved during the Highway 55 reroute. Thank you Coldwater Crew and everyone who has spent time stewarding Mni Owe Sni/Coldwater Spring! It is amazing to see a place bloom when it is cared for.
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