The Minnesota national park sites are teaming up this year to bring a virtual National Park Week experience to you. Explore all six sites through live online activities, downloadable workbooks, solo adventuring in a local park, trip planning live chats, and connecting on social media.
Want to support your national park during National Park Week? Learn how today!
Transportation Tuesday
Mississippi River Paddle Share is a self-serve kayak program that lets you rent a boat for up to three hours and paddle to a destination downriver. It is one of the most immersive ways to experience this national river park. Its fifth season in operation brings new routes and ways to have an on-water experience in the park.
Join Ranger Lauren for a #CoffeeWithARanger presentation on Facebook Live to learn how the Paddle Share system works, get tips for planning your trip, and ask questions.
Visit the newly redesigned PaddleShare.org website, launching in May. You’ll find trip planning resources and updates regarding construction and other events that might impact a route’s availability. Reservations will be available starting May 8, 2020.
Transportation is fundamental to the ways we interact with the only national park that is dedicated to the Mississippi River. From recreational activities like biking, boating and hiking to industrial operations of barges and trains that run on and alongside the river from one end of the country to the other and back again, the river inspires motion.
The most common way people experience the river or ‘visit’ the national park is by driving over it on a bridge or alongside it on the river parkways. Even the birds have their own traffic patterns: more than 325 bird species make the round-trip each year along the Mississippi Flyway, from their breeding grounds in Canada and the northern United States to their wintering grounds along the Gulf of Mexico and in Central and South America.
As you travel through the park, observe things that interact with and are influenced by the flow of the river, and also notice how these things might influence and affect the river in return.
This map from the Trails to Rails Conservancy highlights many of the hundreds of miles of paved paths that are wheelchair accessible along the river and within the park systems. This list is not complete but is a good place to start. Accessible features are often listed on a park’s individual website.
Biking: There are hundreds of miles of bike paths and bike lanes crisscrossing all over Minneapolis and Saint Paul and following the natural paths created by rivers and lakes in the area.
Follow along using this route map.
Bonus: Blast off into the virtual dark skies of Voyageurs National Park with Astro Bob. Robert “Astro Bob” King will share awe-inspiring celestial events, night-sky observation techniques, and answer participant questions. This is the first in a three-part series focused on exploring dark skies.