Selective Focus: When the winter that wasn’t, suddenly was
Select images from Instagram showing scenes of what might normally be considered a very typical late-season snowstorm … if there had been a winter in winter.
Select images from Instagram showing scenes of what might normally be considered a very typical late-season snowstorm … if there had been a winter in winter.
The first Caribou Coffee opened in Edina, Minnesota, in 1992. Last December, it closed. But there are still plenty of other Caribou Coffee locations to visit. Geoguessr Challenge #12 examines some of these other locations in three separate games. The first draws from the 302 remaining Caribou Coffees in Minnesota, selecting five locations in northern Minnesota (defined as any place at or above Highway 2).
There is still time for the winter of 2023/24 to show its stuff. For now, all we have is the past.
Destination Duluth, a nonprofit that shares images and stories on social media in an effort to promote the city and region, recently declared “We want winter back!” A group of photographers have contributed photos from “when we had real winters,” posted with the hashtag whenwinterwas.
As the principle symbol of Duluth, writing on the Aerial Lift Bridge often focuses on its uniqueness. Because it started as a transfer bridge, the top span makes it unusual for a lift bridge. But lift bridges themselves are not so unusual. Wikipedia lists 137 of them in the world.
The postcard photo above is dated 1924, making it 100 years old. It shows a boy driving a car with a sign on the grill that reads “Western Steel Products Company, New Duluth, Minn.” That doesn’t technically mean the photo was shot in the New Duluth neighborhood, however, so the primary mystery of the photo’s location perhaps hinges on whether the houses in the background match any present-day Duluth homes. The identity of the people in the car is the longshot mystery to solve.
This challenge provides the opportunity to go on a road trip without leaving the warmth of your house. Billing itself as “the definitive guide to the world’s hidden wonders,” the website Atlas Obscura lists user-supplied travel destinations that the standard guidebooks usually omit. The site focuses in particular on unusual museums, folk art, natural wonders and memorials to otherwise forgotten history.
References to Duluth in the media are a regular feature on Perfect Duluth Day. But for every reference that does not include the state name, many are left with a lingering doubt about whether the reference is really about Duluth, Minnesota, or Duluth, Georgia, a city outside of Atlanta with about one third of the Minnesota city’s population.
It was 110 years ago today that the first commercial air-ship line took its inaugural flight. The Lark of Duluth didn’t lift off from Duluth that day, however. Tony and Roger Jannus brought the small hydro-aeroplane to St. Petersburg, Fla. by rail with the mission to develop the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line. The Lark arrived there on Dec. 31, 1913, and the inaugural flight was on Jan. 1, 1914.
The photo accompanying this post is presumably not from that historic flight in St. Petersburg, but rather from the previous summer in Duluth.
As this Sunday Geoguessr challenge is appearing on Christmas Eve, a topical theme seemed appropriate. I thought finding five local churches with midnight services would be a rather simple map to put together. It was not.
The first post in this series looked at locations along Superior Street that have gone largely unchanged over the past 60 years. This set of 10 photos looks at locations where the difference between 1963 and 2023 are a bit more evident. In some cases, that is because of major developments like the Gateway Renewal Program, the Holiday Center, the Skywalk system or the I-35 extension. In other instances, it is simply because at some point the building acquired a new façade.
In 1963 an unknown photographer systematically photographed Superior Street, capturing downtown buildings and businesses on both sides. Ninety-five of these images have been preserved on the Minnesota Reflections website.
As enough people played the original Geoguessr challenge series of six games for it to continue as a regular series, new Geoguessr challenges will now appear twice a month on Sundays, at least for the time being, so if you have any ideas for what you might like to see in the future, please share in the comments. As always, an overview of how the game is played appears at the end of this post.
PDD Geoguessr Challenge #5: Independent Booksellers of Northern Minnesota
When the days get shorter and the nights get colder, curling up on the couch with a good book becomes one of the best ways to spend an afternoon. But first you have to find yourself a good book. This GeoGuessr Challenge is all about independent bookstores in Northern Minnesota. And for the purposes of this challenge, Northern Minnesota is any city or town at or above Highway 2.
If you missed the post introducing PDD Geoguessr Challenges, the concept and rules are summarized at the end of this post. That first post had links for two somewhat standard challenges. In this second post, the challenges get a little bit more complicated just to show the different ways Geoguessr games can work.