🛶 Getting in the gorge with your neighborhood river tour guides
Paddle Bridge, whose trailer of kayaks you may have seen parked on 42nd Street, connects people to the splendor of the urban Mississippi.
Maybe you’ve seen them floating down the river. Maybe unloading at Sea Salt. Maybe, perhaps most likely, you’ve seen their converted bus and trailer of kayaks parked on the street near 42nd and Minnehaha.
The flotilla of orange-sunburst kayaks around town is the mark of Paddle Bridge, a Longfellow-owned kayak tour company connecting people to the splendor of the urban Mississippi. I recently got a chance to float along on their flagship tour of the gorge.
Background
Paddle Bridge was started by a group of guides who came from Above the Falls Sports, a North Loop kayak outfitter that was an early champion of the recreational potential of the urban Mississippi in the 2010s. When the business closed in 2018 — in a very North Loop story arc, its building is now a Lululemon — eight of the guides decided to carry on the spirit of the business: showcasing the beauty, variety, and accessibility of the river.
Today the company employs about 15 seasonal workers carrying out all kinds of programming on the river and city lakes: Public tours above and below St. Anthony Falls, private group outings, school trips, summer camps, and community ed courses. The group also operates the Mississippi River Paddle Share program, a Nice Ride-style system that allows you to pick up a kayak at one access point and leave it at another.
Despite the growth, it's still a scrappy operation. Theo Byrnes, one of the company's three core operators, still parks the converted bus and trailer in front of his house and stores the fleet of kayaks in the backyard.
The bus is decorated with the company's name and slogan: "There's a national park in your backyard!" Sitting on a busy stretch of 42nd Street that sees more than 5,000 cars a day, he says the bus generates a fair amount of business and inquiries from curious neighbors. After all, if you see a fleet of kayaks enough times while coming down from the joys of driving on Hiawatha, eventually you get a hankering to...
Paddle the gorge
However much fun you'd expect paddling in the gorge to be, it's more fun than that. The cliff walls are dramatically deep; the canopy is dense and bright; each bridge is unique and towering; the solitude mixes with views of the skyline; hell, even the graffiti and sewer pipes are visually interesting.
It’s not just a bureaucratic technicality that the area is managed by the National Parks Service. It’s genuinely a National Park-grade nature experience. While maybe not quite on par with the Boundary Waters or parts of the north shore in pure grandeur, the gorge's melding of urban and natural beauty gives it an extra panache that purely scenic areas can’t match.
“The river is the southside’s backyard,” Byrnes, a South High grad, says. “There’s just a magic in the feeling of one moment being in the city surrounded by a half-million people, then the next feeling like you’re completely separate from it.”
Like many good things, it feels a little illicit, as if you shouldn’t be allowed to be out there without someone’s special permission. Especially because, if you could, why wouldn’t everybody?
But the main reason everybody isn’t out there is because paddling from point-to-point is a logistical headache. Especially in the gorge where there are so few access points. Figuring out who meets who where, in what order, and how everybody gets back to where they started can make planning a leisurely afternoon adventure feel like solving an SAT problem. Not to mention the low hum of dread of driving anywhere with a boat strapped to your vehicle.
So while they offer a lot more, Paddle Bridge's core offering is simply to spare you from this conundrum. Just show up at Sea Salt with the clothes on your back and they’ll take it from there.
More specifically, for the weekend gorge tour, they’ll drive you up to Bohemian Flats, teach you some kayaking basics, help you into a boat, and push you into the water. From there, the guides provide a context on the history and mechanics of what you’re seeing, while leaving enough space to let you take in the vistas in peace or chat with strangers.
They’ll also take you through the Lock and Dam #1 below the Ford Bridge. For my group, that was the real showstopper. Being slowly lowered 30 feet in a pool big enough for a barge, under the watchful eye of a brutalist concrete lookout tower, and then passing through dramatically slow-moving iron doors that look like they came from the Gates of Mordor, is another “this shouldn’t be possible” moment that's pretty hard to replicate in any other watersports adventure.
After that, it’s a quick paddle to the Hidden Falls takeout, a few minute bus ride back to Sea Salt, and just like that you realize you’ve spent almost your entire three-hour window enjoying the water and none of it thinking about coordinating rides or cleaning gear. What a deal!
Take a tour
Paddle Bridge hosts public tours six days a week, though the gorge tour is only available on weekends because of the limited hours of the lock and dam.
The rest of the week they offer a variety of tours above St. Anthony Falls, including one focused on history, another on birding, and another under the moonlight. Learn more at their website.