Recreation and Places of Interest

Minnesota offers a variety of recreational facilities. Summer homes as well as tourist camps and resorts line the shores of the state’s countless lakes. There are excellent facilities for water sports. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and Voyageurs National Park are adjacent areas near the Canadian border. They constitute the state’s largest wilderness area and provide numerous streams and lakes for campers, canoeists, and hunters.

Minnesota’s abundance of ice and snow provide ideal conditions for skiing, bobsledding, hockey, ice fishing, and iceboat races. Ski runs and skating rinks are numerous, especially around the Twin Cities, where snow-making equipment, floodlights for night skiing, and indoor skating rinks have been installed.

National Parks

Minnesota has two national forests. Superior National Forest, covering nearly 1.6 million hectares (3.9 million acres) in the northeast, is one of the largest in the United States. Chippewa National Forest, at 270,000 hectares (660,000 acres), contains many lakes, including the large Winnibigoshish, Leech, and Cass lakes.

Voyageurs National Park, located near the border with Canada, contains interconnected northern lakes, dotted with islands. The region was once the route of the French-Canadian voyageurs. Also under National Park Service jurisdiction are the Saint Croix National Scenic Riverway and the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, whose waterways flow past noted cultural, historical, and industrial features.

Grand Portage National Monument, the site of the 18th-century trading post of the British North West Company and a vital link for water travelers, is located in the northeastern corner of the state. Pipestone National Monument, in the southwestern corner, preserves the sacred Native American quarries of soft red stone from which ceremonial pipes were carved.

State Parks and Forests

Minnesota has 93,000 hectares (231,000 acres) of land in parks and recreation sites. Many of the parks are along northern Lake Superior, where rivers, such as those in Gooseberry Falls State Park, tumble over waterfalls into the lake. Wisconsin and Minnesota share Interstate Park, where the turbulent Saint Croix flows through deep and narrow rock gorges, called the Dalles of the Saint Croix. The source of the Mississippi can be seen at Itasca State Park near Bemidji. Fort Ridgely State Memorial Park was the site of two major battles in the Sioux Uprising of 1862. The numerous state forests are principally in northeastern Minnesota and along the Mississippi.

Museums

Notable art galleries in Minneapolis are the Walker Art Center, the American Swedish Institute, the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The University of Minnesota also maintains a museum of natural history in Minneapolis. Saint Paul is home to the Science Museum of Minnesota and the Minnesota Children’s Museum.

Other Places to Visit

The iron ranges with their huge open-pit mines draw many visitors, as do the old lumbering towns of Brainerd and Bemidji. Brainerd’s museum, Lumbertown, U.S.A., is a reconstructed logging town. Sauk Centre was the boyhood home of Sinclair Lewis and the model for the fictional small town Gopher Prairie in his novel Main Street. The Minnesota Historical Society administers 21 historic sites, including old Fort Snelling, on a bluff overlooking the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers, built in the 1820s and now largely restored; the boyhood home of aviator Charles A. Lindbergh in Little Falls; the Mille Lacs Indian Museum at Onamia; the William W. Mayo Home in Le Sueur (see Mayo (family)); and the Lower Sioux Agency, near Morton, where the Sioux uprising of 1862 began.

Source: MSN Encarta: Online Encyclopedia