Blaine, MN
Busiest general aviation airport in Minnesota by aircraft operations — typically over 100,000 a year, more than any other reliever in the metro. Class D, two runways (9/27 at 5,000ft, 18/36 at 4,855ft). The Metropolitan Airports Commission owns it as a KMSP reliever. Janes Field Aviation, Inflight Pilot Training, and Wings Financial Credit Union's aviation division all operate from the field. The Aviation Heritage Park on the south side preserves a Hiller helicopter, a T-33 Shooting Star, and an OH-58 Kiowa. Anoka County is part of the suburban ring north of St. Paul; the airport feeds the corporate-headquarters belt along I-35W.
The Mississippi River bends sharply through downtown St. Paul, with Holman Field sitting inside the horseshoe on the south bank. The St. Paul skyline rises directly off the runway. A few miles north and west, the river runs through downtown Minneapolis between the Stone Arch Bridge (1883, James J. Hill's Great Northern Railway crossing) and St. Anthony Falls — the only true waterfall on the entire Mississippi. The river continues east through pilot-friendly bluff country toward Wisconsin. This stretch is one of the most distinctive river-and-skyline visual environments any GA pilot flies through.
Charles A. Lindbergh grew up on this 110-acre farm on the Mississippi River outside Little Falls, Minnesota. His father Charles Sr., a US Congressman, built the 1906 Colonial Revival farmhouse; young Charles spent boyhood summers here from 1906 until he left for college in 1920. The original house, the carriage house where the family kept their Model T (which young Charles learned to drive at 11), and an aircraft hangar Lindbergh later built on the property are all preserved. Lindbergh visited the property repeatedly after the 1927 Paris flight; he donated it to Minnesota in 1931 as a state park. The interpretive center at the park entrance covers Lindbergh's aviation career, his late-life environmental work, and his complicated political reputation in the 1930s and 1940s.
On the north edge of Hibbing, the Mesabi Range opens into a canyon nobody intended: the Hull-Rust-Mahoning pit, the largest open-pit iron mine in the world, three and a half miles long and around 535 feet deep. They call it the Grand Canyon of the North, and from the air the comparison holds; stepped red and grey benches falling away in terraces. It began in 1895 as a scatter of separate mines that grew into each other. The town of Hibbing was originally next to the ore; in 1919 they moved the town, buildings and all, a couple of miles south so the mine could keep expanding. At its WWI and WWII peak it produced a quarter of all the iron ore in the country, which is most of the reason the United States could out-build everyone in steel. Still active, still getting bigger.
On a 130-foot cliff on Lake Superior's North Shore, 50 miles northeast of Duluth. Built 1909-1910 in response to the Mataafa Storm of November 1905, which sank or grounded 29 ships on Lake Superior in a single November day — including the Edenborn and Madeira, both wrecked within sight of the future lighthouse location. The Mataafa itself, a steel ore carrier, broke in half against the Duluth piers; nine men froze to death on the stern while their crewmates watched from shore. Congress funded Split Rock and three other Lake Superior lighthouses the following year. The light was decommissioned in 1969 when modern shipping switched to GPS. The Minnesota Historical Society now operates the lighthouse and grounds. Every November 10 — the anniversary of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sinking — the light is lit ceremonially.