How Minnesota Are You?

Catch Eelpout in Walker or Walleye on Mille Lacs—in Winter
Most Minnesotans know that ice fishing is a subterfuge, simply a stopgap between the invention of the garage and the Nintendo console. But if sitting in a shack on a frozen lake and avoiding your significant other isn’t your idea of a perfect Saturday afternoon, at least get an abstract impression of the draw. One way is the ridiculous Eelpout Festival, with a cash prize for the biggest (and ugliest—have you seen an eelpout?) fish. Another is to head to Mille Lacs any weekend in January or February. Bring the schnapps, and you’ll be welcome. Feb. 15–17, 2008, Walker

Witness the Northern Lights
This one takes time, luck, and a love of sky gazing, but it brings us to our knees.

Share a Silver Butterknife Steak at Murray’s . . .
Minneapolis’s historic home to steak for sixty-one years. Make sure your garlic toast is warm, but, please, no ketchup. 26 S. 6th St., Mpls., 612-339-0909

Ride the Young–Quinlan Elevators Without Pushing a Button
Much of the original architecture remains, but the last remnant of Elizabeth Quinlan’s famed department store—Young–Quinlan—is the eight-decades-old elevator with operators donned in crisp, white gloves, who tend the metal carriage lifts. Quinlan was the country’s first female buyer of women’s ready-to-wear. The building is now owned by Bob and Sue Greenberg, who chose to retain the historic elevators, the last of their type in Minneapolis. 81 S. 9th St., Mpls.

Discover the Lost 40
Logging put Minnesota on the map—not flour milling, Minneapolis’s claim to fame. Commercial lumbering began in 1830—and by 1900 the state’s hardwood forests were nearly depleted. Thanks to a surveying slip in 1882, 144 acres of virgin red and white pine located in Chippewa National Forest dodged Paul Bunyan’s mighty ax. Now known as the Lost 40, the nearly 350-year-old trees represent what our state’s landscape once was. A one-mile self-guided trail winds through the majestic pines that can live up to 500 years. It ain’t the Redwoods, but it is mighty pine.

Attend a Sunday Service at Mount Olivet Lutheran Church
To the extent that Minnesota still has a Scandinavian face, its high temple is this big, bright, south Minneapolis institution, which, with 13,500 members, calls itself the largest Lutheran congregation outside of Sweden. Not coincidentally, this multifaceted superchurch is as clean, safe, and blandly reliable as your Volvo. Each of its four Sunday services starts precisely at the top of the hour and ends dependably thirty-five minutes later. 5025 Knox Ave. S., Mpls., 612-926-7651

Score a Hockey Hat Trick
Minnesota high school hockey is famous for its outstate rivalries and its March tournament in St. Paul, but to really comprehend our state sport in the modern age, with its teenage gladiators on ice, attend a Hill–Murray Pioneers–White Bear Lake Bears game at old-school Aldrich Arena. These two have been going at it since the mid-seventies—private vs. public, Hill’s four state titles vs. WBL’s none. It’s basically good vs. evil, depending on which side of the rink you sit on. Hit the state tourney and take in a Gopher game at Mariucci—and score a hat trick. Dec.–March, For tickets: Aldrich, 651-748-2511; Mariucci, 612-624-8080

Take the Taconite Trek from the Soudan Mine to Silver Bay
They lowered miners 2,341 feet down into the Soudan Mine, the “Cadillac” of iron mines, to dig up its valuable, oxygen-rich ore. About ninety minutes southeast, in Silver Bay on Lake Superior, they processed it into ready-to-use taconite and shipped it off through the chain of Great Lakes. The hulking, dirty complex built by Reserve Mining hard by the pristine and wild Superior is eerie and otherworldly, both on days it’s operating and those it isn’t. The identity of Minnesota’s Iron Range was forged right here. History aside, Soudan’s foreboding hole (now used as a massive atom-colliding physics lab) and Silver Bay’s sublime cliffs are worth the trip.