Looking out from the top-floor balcony of the new downtown hotel last week, I took in a breathtaking view of the Minnesota River sweeping around the bend, sun glistening off the water.

It made me realize again how little we are able to appreciate our river, when most people’s only exposure is a glimpse out the car window while crossing a bridge.

After writing about the river for many years, I’ve had conflicting sentiments about interest in the river today.

It seems, here at the lower end of the Minnesota, the zest for improving and using the river has waned since a big push a decade ago in which hundreds of millions of dollars was poured into land restoration and pollution reduction.

I’ve been re-reading the 1962 book, “The Minnesota: Forgotten River,” by Evan Jones, one of the best comprehensive histories on the river. I wondered if it’s still the Forgotten River.

But it only took a call to Patrick Moore in Montevideo to get juiced up about the prospects for the river. His zeal and optimism are contagious.

Moore and his 15-year-old citizens group CURE — Clean Up our River Environment — have always fascinated me. Keeping any group active and committed is rare. CURE, with a still-growing membership, works with remarkable fervor and success.

Moore was born, literally, near the edge of the river. His father worked for the Veterans Administration and lived in a residence in the 1824 officers’ quarters at Fort Snelling. It’s where Moore got his love for the nature and history of the Minnesota.

He fished the river as a boy and played in an old stockade where the Army, after the 1862 Dakota War, had held hundreds of Indians, and where some soldiers smuggled in blankets infected with smallpox in an attempt to exterminate the Dakota.

“I was born at Fort Snelling, married a girl from Mankato and moved to Montevideo, so I have an affection for the whole river,” Moore says.

Moore and his group are doing battle with a coal power plant just across the border in South Dakota. The Big Stone Power Plant is on the edges of Big Stone Lake, which is the source of the Minnesota River. The plant got approval from South Dakota to build a big addition.

“They would draw off 3.2 billion gallons of water out of Big Stone. They already take 1.8 billion gallons. They’ll take 25 percent of the annual flow on the Minnesota at that spot. It’s four times more water than the 16 ethanol plants in the state use.”

Not to mention the added mercury emissions and other pollution that will come from the plant and settle in the river. CURE has been rattling cages and getting attention from Minnesota officials.

“They’re building a plant outside Minnesota regulations without any input from Minnesota, but using our water and putting out more mercury and emissions in our river. The people in Mankato and Rochester are going to use that electricity and they should know what’s happening out here.”

While Moore is up for a battle when he needs to be, he says his group is happier when it’s working on positive changes. They get farmers, businesses, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and environmentalists to work in concert on improving the river. Their successes on the upper reach of the river are many.