Grand Forks, ND
The airport opened in 1964, but the story that matters started four years later: in 1968, John Odegard launched what would become UND's John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences with two donated aircraft. The school now operates over 100 aircraft and trains 1,500+ students from around the world — roughly 90% of all KGFK operations are UND training flights. On March 1-3 and March 8 of 2021, KGFK led the entire nation in tower operations, briefly outpacing Atlanta and Chicago. Class D extending to 3,300ft MSL, primary runway 17R/35L at 11,999ft (one of the longest in the country). Grand Forks AFB is seven miles west and has its own Class D for UAS operations. The mix of pre-solo students, regional jets, and air carrier pilots makes for unusually complex airspace; controllers here are some of the best in the country.
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.
A 2,300-acre formal garden straddling the US-Canada border at Dunseith, ND / Boissevain, MB. Dedicated in 1932 to commemorate the longest unfortified international boundary in the world — the gardens are physically split between two countries, with formal beds, a chime carillon, a 9/11 memorial built from steel girders from the Twin Towers, and a peace chapel inscribed with quotations on both sides of the border. The line itself runs straight through the central reflecting pool. You can step from the US to Canada and back in three feet.
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.