Minnehaha Falls
Waterfall · Minneapolis, Minnesota
A fifty-three-foot waterfall inside the city of Minneapolis, where Minnehaha Creek drops off a limestone ledge into a wooded gorge and runs a mile down to the Mississippi. Longfellow put it in The Song of Hiawatha in 1855 without ever having seen it, and the poem made it famous enough that tourists were arriving by train within a few years. The park around it is one of the oldest in the city and it functions as Minneapolis's back garden — free, open, on the light rail, and busy with picnics from May to September.
4801 South Minnehaha Drive, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55417, United States
Open daily year round as a public park, free, generally 6:00 to midnight. The falls are rain-fed and can reduce to a trickle or stop entirely in a dry summer; they freeze into an ice column in a cold winter. Parking in the park lot is charged. Sea Salt Eatery and the wading pool are seasonal. A light rail station is a four-minute walk away.