Chad Smith Media

Hidden Falls Park is one of the nicer places I've discovered so far while living in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. It's a beautiful park with the most amazing hidden falls at the end of a trail. Plus, the walk to get to the falls isn't an especially steep trail too, so just about anyone can enjoy it. The park itself dates all the way back to 1887. Horace Cleveland, a nationally-known landscape architect and park planner, selected the current site as one of four major park sites for the city of St Paul. Other than using a portion of the park area as a tree nursery, the city didn't make any improvements to it until 1936-1937. At that point, the WPA carried out an extensive improvement program on the site, which I think was a home run in every way. The small, spring-fed waterfall gives the park its name. The park reached its current form in the 1960s, when work began on the parks four primary use areas. Those areas include what's called the primitive...