Above and middle, Connor Jeffcoat. (Images: CourtneyCushing Kiernat)
When Connor Jeffcoat was a little boy, the woods along the east shore of Cedar Lake were mostly just the way to the beach.
“I didn’t know it very much when I was smaller since the Hidden Beach area was mostly just for the occasional beach day,” he said. Then his family moved closer, to Queen Avenue, a couple of blocks from the forest, and he started spending time there with his friends. “I grew to really appreciate the forest,” he said. “I liked it a lot.”
So when Connor, now 16, a junior at Edina High School and a Life Scout in Troop 33, started thinking about an Eagle Scout project, the forest was his first choice. He asked a friend for help. The friend happened to be the son of Will Stensrud, a Kenwood neighbor who has led years of volunteer work in the forest, and “Mr. Stensrud” showed Connor around.
The spot Connor chose is a hillside behind the rock spiral, where kids had been gathering to build forts. “There wasn’t really much going on,” he said. “It wasn’t really being used for much. It just seemed like an unused space, and I really wanted to make it more purposeful.”
His idea was a structure where kids could build forts and take them down easily. On the work day, he and 12 volunteers stacked two logs into a frame that kids can build against and climb on, then built a corral beside it to hold the loose sticks they built with. “We also decided to add a little seating area for any teachers who wanted to teach the kids something at the specific site or if anyone just wanted to be at the area in general and wanted to sit down,” he said.
That seating area is where this story connects to a much longer one. For more than a decade, a handful of Kenwood neighbors have been setting the stage to use the forest as a classroom.
The Original Seed
The school forest exists on paper because Angie Erdrich, a Kenwood Elementary School parent, decided it should. “When I moved here in 2009, I was introduced to the wild areas of Cedar Lake Park during an Earth Day cleanup,” she said. “Some parents and I started taking our classrooms on hikes and we started the oriole feeders. I found that teachers were not familiar with how close the forest was.”
“I learned the history of the park and realized that with this next generation of advocates, we could team up with the DNR to protect the area,” Erdrich said. She worked with Dr. Keith Prussing of the Cedar Lake Park Association, MaryLynn Pulscher of the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, the Kenwood principal, the DNR, teachers and parents to form a committee and a partnership. In August 2019 the Park Board and the Minneapolis school board passed resolutions officially designating the area a DNR School Forest.
“Formation of the DNR school forest was five years in the making because of the resolutions and legal documents,” she said.
“The forest isn’t just to be tromped through everywhere. The forest is to learn and to tend to and to respect. But along with that, we need a place for kids to play.”
The Sapling
Stensrud has spent years doing volunteer work at Cedar Lake East Beach and in the school forest, much of it by hand: moving boulders with a come-along winch, pulling buckthorn, setting posts. More recently he has been working on a map of the forest.
Working with the Cedar Lake Park Association and James Schaefer, the natural areas manager for the Park Board, he mapped the forest into habitat zones: oak savanna along Upton Avenue, mesic forest on the higher ground, wet meadow and floodplain forest toward the shore. The idea, he said, is for teachers and students to understand the forest as something to learn from and tend, with lessons built around each zone.
“The forest isn’t just to be tromped through everywhere,” Stensrud said. “The forest is to learn and to tend to and to respect. But along with that, we need a place for kids to play.”
The map also marks a nature play area, on the hillside behind the rock spiral where kids were already gathering to build. In Stensrud’s plan, a class learns about the habitat zones, and then, at the end of the lesson, goes to the play area. He had been promoting the idea with the Cedar Lake Park Association and Schaefer, and the intention of the spaces, he said, had started to be accepted.
Then Connor reached out. Stensrud showed him the map and the places he could help: the savanna restoration, buckthorn removal where the wet meadow is planned. Then he took him back to the hillside behind the rock spiral.
“Connor immediately was really like, ‘This is cool,’” Stensrud said. “This is a place that I would like to do something.”
Why nature play in an unnatural place?
There is a reason the play area landed here and not in the savanna, and it is a piece of neighborhood history. Nothing about this hillside is natural.
The ground behind the rock spiral was once the East Bay of Cedar Lake, marshy water stretching to the railroad tracks. Around the mid-1950s it was filled in. Stensrud’s theory, drawn from a newspaper article of the era, is that the fill came in because the Park Board had proposed a parkway around Cedar Lake like the ones at Harriet, Bde Maka Ska and Isles. The parkway was never built. The fill stayed, grew wild and became the rolling hills kids scramble over today, with the odd chunk of concrete showing through.
Stensrud said that the Park Board suggested this was the best spot for a nature play area for exactly that reason: it is fill, dirt and rock, not mesic forest or savanna, so concentrating play here protects the parts of the forest that have more of a native history.
Connor had reached the same conclusion. “I think it’s better to try and improve on a previously touched area than overall affecting a completely new area,” he said.
Taking Root
The project was approved by Sherry Brooks of the Park Board and by Connor’s scoutmaster. Thirteen people completed the work in a day: Connor’s friends, members of Troop 33, a couple of local Cub Scouts, Connor’s family and Stensrud’s. Chainsaws are not allowed in the forest, so the crew used shovels, a hand saw and a winch, digging out spots for the logs and setting them by hand.
The fort frame is two logs stacked on each other, with some climbing opportunities, as Connor put it. The stick corral came out of a practical problem. “We saw that there were a ton of sticks from the previous structures and there wasn’t really much of a space to put them,” Connor said.
“Overall, it wasn’t too difficult,” Connor said of the day. “It was just a bunch of work.” His favorite moment was watching it come together, everyone working on the logs at once.
What’s next for Connor?
Connor is waiting on the project’s formal approval. After that come letters of recommendation and the application for Eagle rank. College is the plan after high school, and beyond that he is still figuring it out.
One thing he is sure of: he wants to keep working in the forest.
Asked what he would tell another scout thinking about a project in a public park, he did not talk about logs or shovels. “It’s really important to learn about the area just as much as actually doing the project,” he said, “because having that kind of information will allow you to make the project feel more like it belongs in the area.”
Asked what he learned from the Park Board and the neighbors he worked with, he replied in a calm baritone that makes him sound older on the phone than he is. He just wants the forest to be a place everyone can enjoy.
“That’s what these kinds of spaces are for,” he said. “They’re for enjoying yourself and being there in nature.”
Craig Wilson is the editor of the Hill & Lake Press. He lives in Lowry Hill.
