Spring Lake Park Reserve
'The 8000 Year Walk'
Hastings, MN

Spring Lake Park Preserve, located on a dramatic bluff overlooking the Mississippi River south of the Twin Cities, Minnesota, is home to rich cultural stories, diverse ecological plant communities, wildlife and one of the country's major avian flight corridors. Despite this breadth of history, however, the unique stories of Spring Lake have long been invisible to most people. Working with Dakota County and a team of cultural resource specialists, CLOSE Landscape Architecture+ provided design concepts and communication graphics to support an NEH grant request to fund construction of an interpretive trail loop named 'The 8000 Year Walk' in recognition of the 8000 years of human habitation on the site.

This trail invites visitors to 'start seeing' the history all around them, and provides an important starting point for future interpretive work throughout the Reserve. Design and interpretive concepts respond to the following American History Themes: Fires Along the Shoreline, Riches of River and Land, and Flight Through Time and Space.