Minneapolis

Taylors Falls: Glacial Potholes, Basalt Climbing & the St. Croix Dalles

At Taylors Falls, 10,000-year-old glacial meltwater drilling through 1.1-billion-year-old columnar basalt left behind the deepest cylindrical potholes in the world — the deepest measured at 60 feet, bored into solid rock by gravel-laden eddies of retreating glacial floods. The Dalles of the St. Croix canyon is simultaneously one of the most important geological sites in the Upper Midwest and one of the premier rock climbing and kayaking destinations within day-trip range of Minneapolis, where basalt crack routes rise above a river whose canyon walls host nesting bald eagles and great blue herons.

Stillwater Slow Day: Antiques, Lowell Inn & Sunset on the St. Croix

Stillwater — Minnesota's birthplace city, platted in 1843 and once the wealthiest logging town in the Upper Midwest — makes for the perfect unhurried day trip from Minneapolis: 30 minutes east on Highway 36 and you arrive at a six-block Victorian Main Street lined with 80 antique dealers operating out of former lumber-era storefronts. The day moves from the layered treasure of the Midtown Antique Mall through the colonial-elegant Lowell Inn for a midday lunch unchanged since the Truman administration, then up to the bluff at Pioneer Park for the finest panoramic view of the St. Croix River valley, with sunset pints at Lift Bridge Brewery and an optional 5-minute water taxi crossing to Wisconsin before the easy drive home.

Stillwater: Minnesota's Birthplace & the Antique Capital of the Midwest

Perched above the St. Croix River on a bluff that once rang with the screech of sawmill blades, Stillwater is where Minnesota began — the first territorial legislature convened here in 1848, making this river town the cradle of statehood before St. Paul or Minneapolis existed as anything more than frontier outposts. The logging wealth of the 1880s left behind a remarkably intact Victorian streetscape, and today more than 80 antique dealers occupy the former storefronts and warehouses of the logging barons, making Stillwater the most concentrated antique destination in the entire Midwest.