![[Lake scene drawing]](http://images.midwestweekend.com/graphics/lake_scene.gif)
For many people, the Minnesota River Valley is full of shadows.
In 1862, years of greed and misunderstanding erupted into a clash that cost settlers their lives, the Dakota their homeland and
a new state its innocence. Even today, the valley's lush peacefulness is undercut by anger and guilt.
But on the first weekend of August, people of indigenous and European descent alike come to Upper Sioux Agency State Park to have a good time. At a wacipi, or powwow, the tradition of welcoming outsiders has held steady for many generations.
Skiers have a hard time figuring out Mother Nature.
It's supposed to snow in central and northern Minnesota, but in the last two seasons, many storms have veered to the south instead. It's odd, but what can you do? You have to go with the snow.
At the end of last February, disgusted with the lack of snow, my friend Becky and I were just about to make the long drive to the snowy Upper Peninsula of Michigan when Winona got blanketed with 30 inches.
The corner of Third Avenue and U.S. 2 in Grand Rapids doesn’t exactly look like the edge of the wilderness.
The Blandin Co. paper mill is across the highway, its flat roof studded by smokestacks that send plumes of white smoke into the air. Trucks rumble past, en route to North Dakota or Duluth.
But this is the beginning of the 47-mile Edge of the Wilderness scenic route, Minnesota’s first National Scenic Byway. Just 10 blocks from U.S. 2, it leaves the city center and begins to skirt McKinney Lake. Then it winds northward, past pristine forests, undeveloped lakes and the occasional quiet village.
Every August, the tiny southeast Minnesota town of Oronoco becomes the mother lode.
Tents full of carved armoires and sideboards pop up along the town's narrow streets. Yards sprout crates of antique lunch boxes and duck decoys.
The church ladies bake pies, the VFW folks flip pancakes and firefighters put hot dogs on the grill. Then the people come, stampeding through the streets like sheep to salt.
In September 1876, a vicious gang of outlaws came up against some ordinary Minnesotans.
The outlaws came out on the short end. Twice.
The Civil War ended more than a decade before the James-Younger Gang rode into Minnesota. But it was far from over in Missouri, devastated by guerrilla warfare and still simmering with resentment.
It's morning in the Little Town on the Prairie, and we're thumbing through the guest book at the Prairie House Manor B&B.
"I can't believe we are in the 'Little Town' where Laura grew up,'' one woman writes. "This is truly a dream come true,'' writes another.
So many little girls, so many dreams. When Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote her nine books about growing up on the American frontier of the 1870s and 1880s, she had no idea her idealized portrait of pioneer life would be such powerful medicine to so many.
Sometimes, it comes as a shock to tourists, especially those who grew up watching the TV show "Little House on the Prairie,'' that life on the frontier wasn't all that fun.
Twenty miles east of Walnut Grove, Stan McCone tells it as it was. A farmer, he'd heard stories about the early sod houses. None remained, so he decided to build one of his own, using an old sod cutter.
"There were 13 sod houses in this neighborhood, and those are just the ones we know about,'' he says. ``But with all those, there's zero recollection of them, and I know why — because of all the buried children alongside them. They had such hardship.''
They’re dramatic characters — serpents of the underworld, and thunderbirds who shoot lightening bolts from their eyes. There are buffalos and stick figures and atlatls, a spear-throwing device, but no bow and arrows, which began to replace the atlatl 1,000 years ago. There are handprints, said to be the place where “rock men,’’ or spirits, closed the rock when they emerged. These spirits, according to Algonquian tribes, had the power to enter rock and exchange tobacco for medicine.
The tales these characters tell — parables or creation stories, perhaps — were deeply significant to the people who began making the carvings about 5,000 years ago, and the site still is considered powerful by their modern descendants. Yet they’re stories no one knows how to read.
That makes the Jeffers Petroglyphs an intriguing mystery. Even seeing the carvings is difficult; in broad sunlight, they tend to fade into the stone.
In the land of 10,000 lakes, prairie often is dismissed as, well, dull.
But in the farthest corner of Minnesota, a dramatic patch of terrain offers more spectacle than an Imax show.
I stood atop Blue Mounds one afternoon in June, watching as bolts of lightening rocketed earthward from a leaden, wraparound sky. At my feet, domes of blood-red rock erupted out of pale grass; nearby, piles of boulders squatted at the edge of a 90-foot cliff, but there was no shelter for anything bigger than a squirrel.
It's easy to see why the Plains Indians saw the Great Spirit at work in a far corner of Minnesota.
Amid an ocean of tall grass, a fractured pile of hard red rock suddenly erupts from the sod. It's Sioux quartzite, once sand at the edge of a red ocean, cooked and pressed into marble-like stone over a billion years. Beneath the quartzite is a thin seam of a softer stone, a red, hardened clay that's barely harder than a fingernail.
This is pipestone, mined for centuries by people of many tribes, who carved into effigies and pipes called calumets, whose
smoke carried messages to the Great Spirit.
A small Red Wing Stoneware sponge bowl, $550. A beat-up pie safe, $795. A shaky coat rack with two broken brackets, $80.
Well, I'm not an expert on antiques. But an empty can of Heet antifreeze for $4?
My friend Andi and I stood contemplating this sight.
There are seven residential learning centers in Minnesota. All are non-profit, funded by a variety of governmental entities and
private foundations, and serve the public at large as well as Minnesota schoolchildren.
All hold day programs, and some schedule special weekends for families or groups of friends. They also can be rented for retreats and family reunions.
Audubon Center of the North Woods: This center near Sandstone in eastern Minnesota, off the Willard Munger State Trail, has a high-ropes course and indoor climbing wall. 1-888-404-7743, www.audubon-center.com.
Under the cornstalks of Fillmore County, an unusual sculpture garden sits in shadow.
Stalagmite topiaries line walkways, alongside pale-green flowstone as translucent as Chinese jade. Stalactite statuettes dangle in artistic arrays.
They’re obviously created by a Pollock of rock, a Van Gogh of stone. Yet their genius relies not on the medium — water, applied one drop at a time — but on eons worth of time.
It was a sunny day in southeastern Minnesota, and everywhere I looked, there were Babes.
Babes bombing along bike trails, Babes prowling the shops of Lanesboro, Babes laughing over white wine in the inn where I was staying. They were the Fat Bottom Girls Cycle Club from Des Moines, also known as Babes on Bikes, and they were having a swell time riding the smooth, scenic trails of the Root River Valley.
I took a group photo of them in front of the Jailhouse Inn in Preston and inquired about their name; I didn’t, ahem, see a fat bottom anywhere.
It was a beautiful fall weekend in Lanesboro, and the streets of this picturesque town in Minnesota’s bluff country were packed with sightseers and bicycle tourists.
They were browsing in gift shops. They were sampling at the winery. They were bicycling on the Root River State Trail.
In fall, Lanesboro is the darling of day-trippers and weekenders. My children and I love it, too. They spent 15 minutes with me in Cornucopia Art Gallery, I spent 15 minutes with them in the Indian crafts shop, and then we went in-line skating on the paved trail, across the trestle bridge and along the limestone bluffs.
If you don't have a cabin of your own, Minnesota has one you can borrow.
Some really are cabins, but others are houses, complete with two-car garages, like the one at Bear Head Lake State Park, previously occupied by the park manager. Some were private houses that have been renovated, like the Illgen Falls Cabin in Tettegouche State Park.
There's something for everyone in Itasca State Park: rooms in a historic lodge, classic cabins, motel-style rooms and new
suites with computer access. It doesn't have camper cabins, but you'll find those at 22 other Minnesota state parks.
At harvest time, Minnesota's bluff country overflows with beauty.
Fat pumpkins await buyers at farmers' markets. Golden clumps of wildflowers line bicycle trails. From buggies, the Amish sell homemade baskets, bumbleberry jam and apple butter.
There's an abundance of everything, including tourists.
For Minnesota bicyclists, there are two seasons: winter and trail construction.
That's a good thing, because bicycle tourists crave more trails and towns crave more bicycle tourists. That little ribbon of asphalt, they've discovered, can put them on the map.
"In our area, it seems one city after another is fighting for trails," says Stearns County parks director Chuck Wocken.
For a river town that has everything going for it, Winona is a little hard for a tourist to get to know.
Those who venture off U.S. 61 find a downtown that's long, spread out and a little forlorn on weekends. To find its Mississippi riverfront, they have to cut across train tracks and around a concrete levee wall.
For 50 years, a paddlewheeler sat atop the riverbank, serving as museum, event center and gathering spot. The Julius C. Wilkie
was only a replica of a steamboat, but it served as city icon and festival namesake, so when the rotting structure was
demolished in 2008, it left a dent in the city's identity.
New Ulm hasn't always understood the kind of people who color outside the lines.
That describes the entire family of Anton Gág, a German-Bohemian artist whose work can be seen at New Ulm's Cathedral of the Holy Trinity and the brewery of August Schell, who was his patron and sent him to art school in Chicago for six months. All seven children were creative, spending their days drawing, telling stories and building sets for plays.
"He didn't want the children to be like other children," says Mary Ann Zins of New Ulm.
There are few towns more conspicuously American than New Ulm, Minn.
Laid out by the town founders, its wide streets follow an orderly grid toward downtown, where cars park at an angle in front of boxy brick businesses and meat-and-potatoes cafes.
There are softball games and Friday-night fish fries and many friendly people. It's the epitome of small-town America — and yet this is a town famous for being German.
In southeast Minnesota, some of the locals stand out a bit.
They travel in horse-drawn buggies, they dress only in dark colors and they speak an archaic German dialect. In their homes and workshops, they refuse to use electricity, natural gas or plumbing, all of which would literally connect them to the outside world.
They're Old Order Amish, direct descendants of a Swiss religious group that believed Martin Luther and other Reformation leaders didn't go far enough in returning the church to strict Scripture. Around 1720, they arrived in America, where they were free to pursue a humble lifestyle that adhered strictly to John 2:15: "Do not love the world or the things in the world; if anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in him."
In southeast Minnesota, along the Mississippi and in its bluffs, fans of folk music and the blues will realize they're really
into country.
Country as in friendly and down-home. Country as in far from the bright lights and big city.
Out in the countryside, music sounds different. In an old general store in Oak Center, it's toasty warm, like late-afternoon sunlight. In the airy loft above a harp-building workshop near Red Wing, it rings out like a church bell on Sunday morning. And in Zumbrota, at the smallest Carnegie library in the state, it's just really, really close.
One spring, I hit the nature-lover's jackpot, almost without trying.
Exploring a septet of Minnesota's scientific and natural areas, or SNAs, I found more pasqueflowers in bloom than I'd ever expected to see in a lifetime. I saw a panorama of the Mississippi as the Dakota would have seen it 200 years ago. I walked under the budding canopies of old-growth forests and listened to choruses of courting frogs.
Wow! An SNA, it turns out, is a fantastic place to see spring at full throttle.