St. Paul, MN
On a meander of the Mississippi River two miles south of downtown St. Paul, in the bottoms where the river makes its sharpest bend in the Twin Cities. Built 1926-1929 as the St. Paul Municipal Airport. In 1931 the field was renamed Holman Field after Charles "Speed" Holman, the legendary stunt pilot and Northwest Airways chief pilot killed at age 33 during an air show in Omaha. Holman flew the first scheduled commercial flight out of St. Paul in 1928 and set multiple speed records before his death. Class D, three runways (14/32 at 6,491ft, 9/27 at 3,642ft, 13/31 at 4,002ft). Operations are roughly half corporate, half flight training, plus charter and the Minnesota Wild's team aircraft when in town. The State Capitol dome is visible north of the field on the approach to runway 14.
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.
Two hundred and six prehistoric Native American earthen mounds on the bluffs above the Mississippi River near Marquette, Iowa — built by the Effigy Mounds Culture (an Upper Mississippian people related to the Hopewell and Woodland traditions) between roughly 750 and 1400 CE. The most distinctive are the effigy mounds shaped like bears (the "Marching Bear Group" — ten bear-shaped mounds in a line) and birds (the "Great Bear Mound" is 137 feet long, the largest at the site). Most other mounds are conical or linear. The mound-builders chose the high blufftops along the Upper Mississippi for visibility and ceremonial significance — the Marching Bear Group sits on a ridge 300 feet above the river. The monument protects 2,526 acres of bluff prairie, oak savanna, and floodplain forest. Designated by President Truman in 1949; the site remains sacred to descendant tribes including the Ho-Chunk, Iowa, Otoe-Missouria, and Sac & Fox. The Mississippi River from above here is the upper end of the Driftless Area — terrain shaped by glacial outwash rather than direct glaciation.
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.