Bloomfield, IN
Shawnee Field has been Greene County's grass option since 1970: a 2,160-foot turf runway a full 150 feet wide, three miles west of Bloomfield, privately owned and open to all. The FAA remarks tell you what to expect: a four-foot slope near the north threshold, birds working the runway, ultralights in the neighborhood. Minor repair and instruction live on the field.
Indiana University's Bloomington campus is one of the most beautiful in the country — 1,900 acres of limestone gothic buildings set among old hardwoods, built almost entirely from the same Salem limestone quarried a few miles south around Bedford. The local stone gives the whole campus a unified warm-grey palette that shifts color with the light, and from the air that grey stone and the dense old-growth canopy are what set the campus apart from the town grid around it. The landmark a pilot will recognize is Memorial Stadium, on the north edge of campus — now the home of the 2025 national champions. Under coach Curt Cignetti (google him), Indiana football — the losingest program in the history of the sport coming into the season — went 16–0 and beat Miami for the first football national title in school history, behind Heisman winner Fernando Mendoza. The stadium and the domed Assembly Hall (basketball) next to it are the most identifiable structures on campus from altitude. At the heart of the old campus, the Sample Gates limestone arch opens onto Dunn's Woods, a preserved remnant of the original forest with the oldest buildings curving around it. If you land and make the trip into campus, two collections reward it: the Lilly Library holds a Gutenberg Bible, a Shakespeare First Folio, and the manuscript of Lincoln's last public address; and Thomas Hart Benton's sweeping mural cycle "A Social History of Indiana," painted for the 1933 World's Fair, is installed in the IU Auditorium. Bloomington itself is a college town in the wooded hills of south-central Indiana, with the Brown County hills and the Nashville art colony just east and Lake Monroe to the southeast.
Indiana's largest waterfall by volume — upper and lower falls in a sandstone gorge on Mill Creek. Not dramatic by Niagara standards, but the gorge itself is striking from the air, cutting a dark seam through otherwise gentle terrain. A covered bridge (one of Parke County's neighbors) sits near the upper falls. Best after heavy spring rains when the falls are running full.
The limestone quarried around Bedford and Bloomington built a startling share of monumental America — the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, the National Cathedral, and some 35 state capitols. The Empire Quarry is the most famous: the pit that yielded 18,630 tons of stone for the Empire State Building. The belt between the two towns is pocked with these workings, active and abandoned, their sheer pale walls dropping to floors of still blue water.
The Salem and St. Genevieve limestone quarried around Bedford built the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, the National Cathedral, the Lincoln Memorial, and 35 of the 50 state capitols. From the air, the massive open-pit quarries are a dramatic landscape — turquoise rectangles cut deep into the earth. The Indiana Limestone Heritage Festival each June celebrates the industry and stonecarving tradition. Just south, the town of Mitchell preserves Gus Grissom's boyhood home — the Mercury 7 astronaut, second American in space, who died in the Apollo 1 fire. The Gus Grissom Memorial includes his Gemini 3 capsule "Molly Brown."