Pipestone Municipal

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.

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 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.

The Strategic Air Command and Aerospace Museum sits along Interstate 80 near Ashland, between Omaha and Lincoln, southwest of Offutt Air Force Base. The collection started outdoors on the Offutt flight line in 1959, the brainchild of SAC commander Thomas Power and Colonel A. A. Arnhym. Curtis LeMay supported it from the start. The aircraft sat exposed to Nebraska weather for forty years. In 1998 the museum moved into a new $30 million indoor complex, 300,000 square feet across two climate-controlled hangars plus a glass atrium designed to display the SR-71A. The atrium shows a Lockheed SR-71A Blackbird (tail number 61-7964) suspended below 525 glass panels. Around it: a Convair B-36J Peacemaker (one of only four surviving), a Convair B-58 Hustler, a Boeing B-47E Stratojet, a Boeing B-52B, a B-29 Superfortress, a Lockheed U-2C Dragon Lady, a Rockwell B-1A Lancer (one of only two surviving), a Boeing KC-97G tanker, a Martin RB-57E, a Douglas C-124 Globemaster II, an Avro Vulcan B.2 on loan from the RAF, and a North Vietnamese MiG-21. The McDonnell XF-85 Goblin is one of only two ever produced. Indoor exhibits also include a Mark 17 thermonuclear bomb, an actual Minuteman silo control panel, and Curtis LeMay artifacts. The aircraft at the heart of the Looking Glass Featured Story is here too: Boeing EC-135 Looking Glass, tail number 63-8049. Restored in 2024 to its 1961-1990 configuration; the airborne command post flew continuously for twenty-nine and a half years to mirror Offutt's underground command center. Visitors can walk inside. Outside the museum, Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman missiles stand vertical in front of the entrance. Most were live ordnance at some point.