On my way to work, I regularly bike over Fort Snelling State Park on the Mendota Bridge. Lately, the water has been extremely high - much of the low lying land was flooded. The view from the bridge was pretty cool, as you could see large tracts of forest that looked like some sort of mangrove swamp as there was no land to be seen beneath them! As I biked back and forth across the bridge, it seemed to me that it would be fun to take advantage of the unusually high water and canoe amongst the trees.
So on Sunday, we grabbed the canoe and headed down to Fort Snelling (after a bike trip to Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden, but more on that in another post). We canoed around in the "swamp", pulled out and picnicked on "Picnic Island" (which had been almost entirely underwater a week or two earlier), saw a muskrat enjoying the relative solitude of the closed park and enjoyed boatloads of Yellow-rumped warblers.
