The harbour side and the sandbar at the point

The strip of land between the old harbour and the main channel was an island once and has not been one for a century. Sediment closed the upstream end, and what is left is a peninsula about three miles long and rarely more than a few hundred yards wide, with entirely different water on either side of it.

That contrast is the whole reason to walk it.

Two kinds of water, thirty yards apart

The harbour side is slack. It is a cut off channel with no current worth the name, and on a still morning it is a mirror, which the main river never is. Herons work it. The reflections of the downtown buildings sit in it unbroken.

The channel side is the Mississippi doing what it does: three or four miles an hour of moving brown water, boils the size of cars turning over on the surface, tows pushing upstream at walking pace.

Walking the length of the point with one on each side is a strange experience that never quite becomes normal.

The bar at the tip

Below about ten feet on the gauge, a sandbar comes up at the downstream end. At seven it is substantial, several acres of clean sand with driftwood along the high line and a view straight down the river.

At twelve feet it is gone. Not covered by a little water, gone, with the current running across where you were standing. The gauge is the whole story here and it is worth checking the morning of rather than the week before.

The light

Both directions work here, which is unusual.

Morning: the harbour side, mirror flat, with the city catching first sun. Best in the hour after dawn before any wind gets up.

Evening: the channel side and the bar, facing west, with the same copper hour described in the bluff piece but from water level rather than sixty feet up.

The walk itself

Flat the whole way, on a mix of paving and packed sand. Three miles out and back is the honest figure for reaching the point and returning.

There is no shade for any of it. From May to September this is a morning walk or an evening walk and nothing else. The heat piece is not being dramatic about that.

Was it worth it

At low stage, yes, and it is the best short walk in the city.

Above twelve feet it is a pleasant flat path beside two pieces of water, which is a lower ceiling. The difference is entirely the bar, and the bar is entirely the gauge.

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