Minnesota

Mesabi Iron Range

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Soudan-Vermilion State Park ❘ Jacob Boomsma/Shutterstock

Mille Lacs Indian Museum ❘ Andre Jenny/Alamy

Open pit mine in Hibbing ❘ Jacob Boomsma/Shutterstock

Sellers’ Mine circa 1905 ❘ Underwood & Underwood/Graphic House/Archive Photos/Getty Images

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Mining created the rusty Grand Canyon of the Midwest, now with plenty of pasties and mountain biking.

Mining began in the late 19th century, which brought enormous wealth to the area and forever changed the land.

From the Hull Rust Mine Overlook in Hibbing, Minnesota, the surrounding landscape looks a bit like the deserts of Utah and Arizona. A pit three miles long and two miles wide reveals striated, rust-colored earth, some of which is filled in with man-made lakes. While some locals call it “Minnesota’s Grand Canyon,” the unusual land was not shaped by eons of wind and water, but rather by people, and in a stunningly short period of time. Either way, the result is a striking landscape in a state full of them.

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Hibbing is part of northeast Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range, a stretch of iron and taconite deposits that appeared almost two billion years ago. The name “Mesabi” is a disambiguation of the Ojibwe name Misaabe Wajiw, meaning “Big Man Mountain,” also called the Giants Range batholith.

Cuyuna Country State Recreation Area ❘ Leila Navidi/Minneapolis Star Tribune/ZUMA Press/Alamy

Mining began in the late 19th century, which brought enormous wealth to the area and forever changed the land—politically, culturally, and geographically. Discovery of copper and gold in the area led settlers to push out the local Ojibwe people through a series of coercive treaties, which both forced the Ojibwe people onto nearby reservations and eventually stripped their ancestral land of its resources. To this day, the Ojibwe fight for land reclamation in a world of European influences. Strikes in 1906 and 1917 prompted companies to replace local workers with European immigrants, resulting in pockets of Jewish, Italian, and Scandinavian traces across the region.

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Much of the food in the region reflects that story. Bakeshops such as Sunrise Bakery in Hibbing serve potica, a strudel-like sweet bread filled with walnuts, as well as pasties, meat pies long eaten by iron workers on their lunch breaks. Here, porketta sounds just like Italian porchetta, but instead of a whole pig rolled with seasonings and roasted over an open flame, porketta is a pork roast rubbed with garlic and oregano, then slow cooked and shredded into sandwiches. Try one at Fitz’s Wandering Pines in Gilbert, or at basically any grocery store in the region.

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After you’ve had your fill of underground mine tours and a visit to the Greyhound Bus Museum, check out the Mille Lacs Indian Museum about a two-hour drive away. There you’ll find exhibits full of Ojibwe language games, puzzles, crafts, workshops, and a trading post.

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The Iron Range also offers endless miles of outdoor activities. The towns of Crosby and Ironton have become the state’s unofficial mountain biking capital, thanks in part to the Cayuna Lakes Trails. The Mesabi Trail is a paved bike route that traces 150 miles between Grand Rapids and the Boundary Waters, where you can explore by canoe. In the winter, trails abound for ATVs, snowmobiles, cross-country skiers, and snowshoeing.