Red Wing

We climbed Barn Bluff before the town below had properly woken up, following a switchback trail that Henry David Thoreau himself once hiked on a Minnesota river trip in 1861. Four hundred feet up, Red Wing spread out below us in a grid of brick storefronts, the Mississippi curling wide and silver-gray around the base of the bluff, barges moving so slowly they seemed pinned in place. Lia, half out of breath, said it looked like the town had been built specifically to be looked down upon from this exact spot. She wasn’t entirely wrong.

Pottery, boots, and a working river town

Red Wing built its name on two things: stoneware and boots. The Red Wing Stoneware Company still throws pottery in the same tradition that made this a ceramics capital in the 1800s, and downtown, the flagship Red Wing Shoe Store houses the World’s Largest Boot — a genuine, if slightly absurd, eighteen-foot leather boot you can climb inside for a photo. We wandered the brick streets of the historic district, ducking into the restored St. James Hotel and a handful of pottery studios where wheel-thrown mugs cooled on shelves, glaze the color of the river itself.

The bluffs and the river valley

Beyond Barn Bluff, the surrounding countryside is classic Mississippi River bluff country — limestone palisades, hardwood ravines, and the occasional bald eagle riding a thermal above the water. We drove the river road south toward Frontenac, stopping to watch a barge negotiate Lock and Dam No. 3, then hiked a shorter trail at Welch Village where the maples were just starting to turn. It’s the kind of landscape that makes it obvious why this stretch of the river was, and still is, called the Hiawatha Valley — dramatic without ever feeling remote.

Getting There

Red Wing sits about an hour southeast of Minneapolis–St. Paul via US-61, a scenic drive that hugs the river for much of the way. Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport is the nearest major gateway. Amtrak’s Empire Builder also stops in town, a pleasant option if you’d rather watch the bluffs go by from a train window than a windshield. Once there, downtown and Barn Bluff are both walkable from the historic hotel district.