Crystal, MN
Owned by the Metropolitan Airports Commission as a north-metro reliever. Three runways on 437 acres, Class D, busy flight-training field with 50,000+ operations annually. Thunderbird Aviation has run flight training here since 1962. Crystal is sandwiched between Robbinsdale and New Hope in the inner-ring suburbs northwest of Minneapolis — pattern altitude here keeps aircraft under 1,500ft AGL because of the dense surrounding population. Runway 14L/32R was decommissioned in 2018 after years of underuse; the field now operates with two parallel turf runways and one paved.
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.
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.
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.