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 |
