Milwaukee from water level: Paddling the complete harbor estuary
WISCO 100: This is the fifth in a series of reports on 100 outdoor adventures across Wisconsin, spanning every corner of the state and embracing the broadest possible definition of adventure.
Three rivers flow into Milwaukee Harbor: the Milwaukee, the Menomonee and the Kinnickinnic. I wanted to kayak all three. At the same time.
A ridiculously ambitious adventure, but not too ridiculous. I had:
a day to kill, and
paddling on the brain.
As an additional unintended perk, maybe I would be remembered in the unofficial record books as the first kayaker to complete the full Milwaukee Harbor estuary. The two or three people who care about such feats would sing my praises forever, or until they got distracted by a tugboat or the backside of the Bronz Fonz.
The estuary is basically all of the flat water that connects to Lake Michigan from the rivers’ triune tentacles. The estuary is the terminal segments of the three rivers, where they stop acting like rivers and act more like harbor.
If you were to start at the Hoan Bridge and and try paddling up the Kinnickinnic, you would only get as far south and west as the I-94 overpass before the flat water transitioned suddenly into the narrow boulder field marking the KK’s upstream incline. North of downtown, the Milwaukee River starts its own impassable climb at a point near North Avenue. Even the strongest paddler can’t overpower that current. The Menomonee shoots straight west from the city, and depending on the water level, you can paddle upstream at least to Three Bridges Park, maybe as far as the Brewers’ parking lots, before the riffles and current knock you back.
Three rivers flow into Milwaukee Harbor, and I already had paddled up each as far as I could, on separate occasions. The new goal was to do all three without ever leaving my boat.
Does this make me a completionist? A speedrunner? Some definitions might help.
A running friend of mine is known in our group as The Completionist. If there is a trail, he runs the whole trail. A point-to-point run? Better hit that point and the other point too. No segment of a run should remain unrunned. In this worldview, to leave a tenth of a mile untouched would be a crime.
The opposite of a completionist is a speedrunner, someone who gets from the starting line to the finish line in as little time as possible, taking whatever shortcuts are available and legal (or sometimes not).
The terms originate not in endurance sports but in the gaming world. A speedrunner’s achievement would be to play a video game designed to last, say, 30 hours and beat it in a fraction of that time, maybe less than 30 minutes. When I was a teenager, one of my proudest moments was getting through all nine levels of The Legend of Zelda on the original Nintendo in barely two hours.
Speedrunner.
A completionist, on the other hand, is someone who wants to take time to roam every corner of a video game’s map, picking up every item, leveling up in all the ways, leaving no stone unturned or bomb unexploded.
I’ve never thought of myself in either of these terms, until now, after paddling up and down the waterways that make up the Milwaukee Harbor estuary. I completed the entire trip in the shortest amount of time my arms would allow, about four hours. So, this ridiculously ambitious adventure was a kind of completionist-speedrunner hybrid, and like most of my adventures, there was no grand motivation behind it other than to see if I could pull it off.
Also, as with most of my adventures, the aftermath was troubled by nagging questions. Was that really worth my time? Did I do it the right way? What does it even mean to finish fast or with completeness?
Main story or the whole story?
Every culture and subculture has its insider jokes. In the gaming world you can buy a mug inscribed with the boast: “Speedrunner in the streets, completionist in the sheets.”
There are speedrunner heroes, like the player a couple years ago who completed Baldur’s Gate 3 “from start to credit roll” in 10 minutes. Wow, I’m not sure I can complete anything in just 10 minutes, whether in the streets or in the sheets!
I also don’t know anything about Baldur’s Gate 3 — never played it, never completed it — but apparently it takes 72 hours. That’s the average. A completionist ultramarathon on Baldur’s Gate 3 could last 174 hours! The only reason I have such stats at my fingertips is because they are listed on the gamer website named HowLongToBeat. (The website clearly has a speedrunner vibe, based on that elimination of the SpacesBetweenWords.)
Each game listed on the website has a “main story” duration and a “completionist” duration. I looked up the original Zelda game, and there isn’t much difference between the main story length of 8 hours and the 9 1/2 hours it takes to do everything. My guess is this narrow variation is the sign of a well-designed game, even though both ways are much shorter than completing Baldur’s Gate 3.
The gaming world also has completionist phenoms, like Jirard Khalil.
Khalil has made a name for himself, mostly on YouTube, for cracking open video games, taking his time, finding everything there is to find, generally refusing to be in any rush. Since 2012, he has reviewed hundreds of games and amassed millions of views, all for rejecting the need for speed.
As someone who can’t resist going faster than I should, often to the point of failure, I find the slow and thorough approach baffling. Isn’t that like going to a minigolf course and trying to max out on strokes at every hole?
But maybe I was more of a completionist than I realized. Wasn’t my Milwaukee estuary excursion a completionist project? The whole point was to touch every corner of the harbor’s flat water, while most other kayakers choose to sample smaller segments.
The complete estuary. To pull off something like that, I would need more than speed. I would need a plan.
A journey across Milwaukee at water’s level
I wasn’t quite sure how long it would take — maybe all day! — but since I had paddled the three rivers before, I had a general sense for the time I would need to devote to each and the most efficient overall route. I also knew it would require a bicycle.
It went something like this.
Load the kayak on top of the van and throw the bicycle into the back. Drive to Canal Street and drop the kayak at the Menomonee River launch just south of the Brewers parking lots. Then drive to the Kinnickinnic River just west of I-94 on Milwaukee’s south side. Park the van on Cleveland Avenue. The bike comes out of the trunk. Pedal back to the kayak on the Menomonee River. There, the real outing was about to begin.
A gray-haired gentleman carrying a water bottle was jogging by and saw me chaining up my bike near the kayak.
“Wait a second,” he said. “Bicycle. Kayak. How did you do that?!”
“Multimodal,” I said with pride, and left him to guess at the rest.
The paddle down the Menomonee is about three miles, through a mostly industrial landscape and under one creepy railroad bridge west of the Potawatomi Casino. Before the river feeds into the harbor, it also passes by Marquette University’s athletic dome (seasonal), the City Lights brewery (21 and older, please) and the Harley-Davidson Museum. … Multimodal?
With a sharp left turn, the boat is now pointing north up the Milwaukee River. This is the heart of downtown Milwaukee, where you will often find the water polluted with party boats, tiki pontoons, muscle yachts, harbor cruise ships and the choppy, criss-crossing waves that all that traffic unleashes on lesser watercraft as they paddle through the urban canyon. Part of my plan, however, involved launching on an off-season weekday, so for this trip, the water was surprisingly calm.
Downtown is definitely the coolest part of the estuary. I love the juxtaposition of the lowly water-level view and the towering significance of the surrounding high rises. Milwaukee City Hall. Milwaukee Public Market. Fiserv Forum. Apartments for rent. Private boat slips, no docking. The Bronze Fonz. The Milwaukee Rep. Pere Maquette Park, and the old Journal Sentinel building behind it.
“A Clean River Is a Fun River” is painted next to the drain pipes pumping outflow into the river, incorporated into a mural made to look like an amusement park water slide.
And then there are the drawbridges. Milwaukee has 21 movable bridges, and if you time it just right, you can paddle under them as they open or close.
Sometimes those bridges are frozen in an open or a closed position, like the one at Cherry Street. The west side of the bridge was positioned down, and its decking had been removed. The east side was in an upright position. While I paddled by, I got an up-close look at a bridge repair crew hard at work, its tugboat helping to move barges with heavy machinery into place. Another crew member piloted a support boat and acknowledged me as I passed in my kayak.
“That’s a good way to spend the day,” he yelled over to me. I certainly agreed.
Farther north, the Milwaukee River starts to resemble a river again, past Lakefront Brewery and the Beerline Trail’s pedestrian bridge. A family of Canada geese honked at me. I put down my paddle to snap a photo of the tiny goslings.
Ahead, I spotted my turnaround point, the pivot in the river where it once was held back by the North Avenue Dam. The dam may be gone now, but the current is just as much of a barrier for the upstream kayaker. I made it just past the pedestrian bridge and then swung around to begin retracing my route back to the harbor.
Every street, every river
That segment up and down the Milwaukee River was about five miles, plus another mile to the mouth of the three rivers, where they flow under the Hoan Bridge and feed into the lake.
From the Hoan up the Kinnickinnic River to the I-94 overpass, my last stretch of paddling, would be a little more than two miles. If I could make it that far, my van would be waiting at the end. But was this complete enough?
There is another kind of completionist, specific to running. Maybe you have heard of CityStrides? It is an app that lets you track every street you have run, with the goal of running on all streets in your chosen city. Several members of my weekly running group are mildly obsessed with this, and running with them can sometimes devolve into illogical detours, picking up “nodes” at the end of cul-de-sacs and through inconspicuous alleys. The destination on those runs is not as important as Node Glory.
The Milwaukee king of CityStrides, as he will gladly inform you, is Chris Ponteri. Also known as “the Man Who Ran Every Street in Milwaukee.” Those were the types of headlines showering Chris with acclaim when he completed that CityStrides feat in 2022, but Chris didn’t stop there. He has since completed Shorewood, Wauwatosa, West Allis, Greendale, Greenfield, Brookfield and other suburbs with runable streets. Lately, you can spot him out in his HOKAs running New Berlin or Whitefish Bay — he’s getting close to completing both. Maybe someday he will put a check mark next to the entire state of Wisconsin!
I can understand the appeal of CityStrides, even though I don’t aspire to Node Glory myself. I even created a CityStrides account, back in 2019 when I was trying to run every street in Wauwatosa, but I lost interest in tracking my progress online. Instead, I found a foldable hard-copy map of the city produced by the chamber of commerce and marked my completed streets the old fashioned way, with black marker. Becoming a Tosa completionist was good motivation in a year when I was recovering from an injury, but I don’t think I’ll ever try something like that again.
And yet, a similar logic applied to my Milwaukee estuary paddle. The nominal accomplishment was to be able to say I navigated the boat up and down all three rivers. But to be 100% complete, I thought, would require braving the harbor, too.
So, before pointing south to the Kinnickinnic, I pointed east to Lake Michigan. The Hoan is always an impressive landmark, including its underbelly, as is the red harbor lighthouse at the end of the fishing pier despite being covered with graffiti. Even with minimal wind and the breakwater’s protection, the waves here were more formidable than they were on the rivers. I hugged the shoreline and paddled toward Discovery World, as a police boat chased down a rogue watercraft. Not sure what that guy was doing wrong, but he wouldn’t be completing his plans anymore.
Piloting the kayak into the calm cove next to the Summerfest grounds was a first for me, and I beached it on the sand of Lakeshore State Park to get out and stretch my legs for a beat. The Milwaukee skyline was looking sharp as usual, but I didn’t dally. My arms, though sore, still had a few miles left in them, and I was itching to get to the end of this outing.
Completing the never-complete adventure
In a video game, being a completionist holds much possibility and reward. And eventual success. Games are finite. No matter how expansive the video game, the designer could only pack it with so much discovery. Eventually all the nuggets will be exhausted, and the only option left is to reach the end credits.
But life is a series of infinite possibilities, never fully exhausted, never to be fully explored even by the most ardent completionist. And then the end credits roll.
Milwaukee’s rivers are a case study. By the time I made it up the Kinnickinnic to my end point and hauled the kayak up the side of a hill to the street, it was clear this 14-mile paddle had been a speedrun all along. There was so much along the route that, in my haste, I hadn’t fully explored and inspected.
Like the shadows under the 35th Street overpass, the mostly submerged wooden posts of former docks, the faded murals on the north side of the Menomonee. A sandpiper had briefly caught my eye; I wish I had spent more time trying to identify it. There are connecting canals that that I didn’t bother with, even though I’ve found night herons back there on a previous paddle. So much of downtown Milwaukee can be seen from the Milwaukee River, yet I didn’t stop and savor any of it. Maybe the honking Canada geese had been trying to tell me to slow down.
Lake Michigan’s water level is much lower this year, which makes it even easier to venture underneath the now dormant swing bridges that formerly carried trains across the Milwaukee River and the Kinnickinnic. I bypassed them both. Nor did I bother stopping to inspect the tugboats docked on either side of the KK. A true completionist would have spent more time waiting for swallows to poke their heads out of their nests under the Lincoln Avenue bridge or paddled closer to the cattails and reeds in search of critters sheltering there.
I didn’t so much regret speedrunning the Milwaukee harbor estuary as I realized it had told me only part of the story, the main story. To approach nature and the outdoors as a completionist project requires going back again and again and again, knowing that it will never actually be complete, and being OK with that.
There is a special kind of joy in embarking on such an impossible quest. There will always be more to see, as long as your arms can paddle it.