Fargo, ND
The busiest commercial airport in North Dakota, three miles northwest of Fargo. Named for Martin Hector, who leased then donated the original 50 acres to the city. Class C, joint civil-military — the Fargo Air National Guard Base sits adjacent, home to the 119th Wing "Happy Hooligans," now flying the MQ-9 Reaper from this field. "International" comes from customs service for arrivals from Canada, not scheduled overseas flights. Primary runway 18/36 at roughly 9,000ft, plus secondary. Commercial service from American, Delta, United, Frontier, and Allegiant.
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.
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.
A 282-acre national monument in southwestern Minnesota preserving the soft red catlinite quarries where Plains tribes have carved ceremonial pipes for at least 3,000 years. Catlinite — pipestone — is a metamorphic claystone unique to this site, soft enough to carve with antler tools but durable enough to survive heating in tobacco fires. Quarrying is restricted by federal law to enrolled members of federally recognized tribes; the monument's interpretive center features active demonstrations by Native carvers. The site was sacred to multiple Plains nations who maintained a truce here regardless of conflicts elsewhere — a kind of Plains-tribes Geneva Convention zone, dating to before European contact. George Catlin, the painter, visited in 1836 and the stone is named for him.