Duluth, MN
Class C field on a hill 600 feet above Lake Superior. Built 1930 as the Williamson-Johnson Municipal Airport on a deal struck between the City of Duluth and the Williamson and Johnson families, who donated the original land. Joint civil-military: the 148th Fighter Wing of the Minnesota Air National Guard flies F-16 Fighting Falcons from the south side of the field, and during the Cold War the 148th flew F-51 Mustangs, F-94 Starfires, and F-101 Voodoos defending the eastern Lake Superior approach to Canadian airspace. The historic Northwest Airlines maintenance base operated here from 1928 until the 2010 Delta merger — at peak, NWA's Duluth heavy-maintenance facility employed 1,500 people working on DC-9s and DC-10s. Cirrus Aircraft has its headquarters and primary final-assembly line on the east side of the field; every SR20, SR22, and Vision Jet built since 1999 has rolled out the doors here.
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.
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.
Twenty-two wild islands scattered off the Bayfield Peninsula at the far northern tip of Wisconsin, in the cold clear water of Lake Superior. The mainland and island shores are lined with red sandstone cliffs that Superior's waves have carved into a maze of sea caves, arches, and chambers. In summer kayakers thread the caves; in a hard winter — when the lake freezes solid enough to walk on, which doesn't happen every year — the caves transform into the famous Apostle Islands ice caves, hung with cathedral-scale icicles and frozen waterfalls, drawing pilgrims across the ice. The islands hold old lighthouses and the largest collection of historic light stations in the Park System; one, Sand Island, still has old-growth forest.
A million-acre wilderness along the US-Canada border in northeastern Minnesota — 1,175 named lakes connected by portages, no roads, no motors, no permanent structures. The BWCAW gets roughly 165,000 paddlers annually, all entering by permit from designated entry points. Adjacent to Canada's Quetico Provincial Park, the combined cross-border wilderness covers 2.4 million acres of the Canadian Shield. The lakes occupy ancient bedrock depressions scoured by Pleistocene ice sheets; the bedrock itself is 2.7 billion years old, among the oldest exposed rock on the continent. Forest is boreal — black spruce, jack pine, white birch, paper birch, balsam fir. From the air the wilderness reads as a continuous mosaic of dark forest punctuated by hundreds of irregularly-shaped lakes.