Brainerd, MN
In the heart of Minnesota lake country, a few miles west of Brainerd. Single 6,500ft runway 5/23, plus crosswind 16/34 at 3,499ft, Class D. The Brainerd Lakes area has roughly 460 lakes within a 25-mile radius and is the densest concentration of fishing and family resorts in the upper Midwest. Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox have been the regional mascots since the 1930s; the original 26-foot Paul statue still sits two miles east of the airport. Delta operates seasonal service via SkyWest. The airport hosts the Brainerd Airshow most summers — a regional draw that has featured the Blue Angels and Thunderbirds in past decades.
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.
The source of the Mississippi River — a knee-deep stream you can walk across, flowing out of Lake Itasca in north-central Minnesota. From this point the river runs 2,348 miles south to the Gulf of Mexico, gathering water from 31 states and two Canadian provinces along the way. Henry Schoolcraft, a federal Indian agent with an Ojibwe guide named Ozawindib, identified Itasca as the true headwaters in 1832 — Schoolcraft coined the name from the Latin "verITAS CAput" (true head). The lake is itself glacial, gouged out of bedrock by the Laurentide Ice Sheet about 12,000 years ago. Itasca State Park surrounds the headwaters; the original 1891 protection of the area made it Minnesota's first state park. The stream emerging at the headwaters is about 18 feet wide and one foot deep.
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.
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.