On Saturday I take Tim (boy), Ben (boy), Kateva (dog) and Sam (dog) to the world famous Minnehaha dog park. Tim wants us to take a back route he'd discovered "to the dog park".
That seemed feasible, so well descended the bluff to the river. We came out at the bridge in the top left of this sat map:
It's a great walk, I enjoyed the public works plaques and the massive steps. Lots of fishing at the north side of that bridge. So we started downriver towards the park.
That's how we ran into the massive structure inn the bottom right of the above photo. It's a huge water outlet, presumably for storm drainage. Turns out you can climb up and over the top, which I did with two dogs and two boys. The weird structure that seems to run into it is a series of concrete steps and shapes; I think it might have been a 1950s era fountain/water fall. Sam decided to explore that massive drain structure, which is a bit of a trick since there's no easy exit. He just jumped back up from the base to the seven foot wall and came along with us.
From there it's a long slog on rocky beaches -- or you can climb up about ten feet and find a de facto trail. This entire stretch is now very isolated from Minnehaha park, but it's obviously known to local teens. There's a century of expression carved into the limestone cliffs, endless messages to lost loves. Occasionally we see hand and foot holds carved in the rock, allowing access to open stone.
We eventually made it to the dog park. It probably only took 20 minutes, but it felt like eons. Ben was pretty flexible, and Tim just raced ahead with Sam and Kateva. Every five minutes or so Kateva would run back to check on Ben and I, then race around us and return to Sam, Tim and the beach.