Grand Forks

Lia and I arrived in Grand Forks not entirely sure what to expect from a city best known, if it’s known at all, for the catastrophic Red River flood of 1997 that submerged most of downtown and forced a citywide evacuation. What we found instead was a quietly confident river town that had rebuilt with real intention — instead of restoring downtown right up to the water’s edge, the city and its Minnesota twin, East Grand Forks, cleared the floodplain entirely and turned it into a sprawling greenway, one of the largest urban river-recreation projects in the country.

The Greenway and the two cities

We rented bikes and spent an afternoon riding the paths that now trace both banks of the Red River, crossing back and forth between North Dakota and Minnesota on a handful of pedestrian bridges without ever quite noticing the state line. The greenway rolls through nearly 2,200 acres of parkland, disc golf courses, and cottonwood groves that flood on purpose each spring so the neighborhoods behind the levees don’t have to. It’s a strange, hopeful kind of infrastructure — a park built explicitly to fail safely, absorbing the river’s temper so the city around it doesn’t have to relive 1997.

Downtown and the university

Downtown Grand Forks has come back with a mix of restored brick storefronts and new infill along DeMers Avenue, anchored by the Empire Arts Center, a 1919 vaudeville theater turned community stage where we caught a local jazz ensemble on a Friday night. A few miles south, the University of North Dakota gives the city its steady undercurrent of youth and its unlikely claim to hockey fame — the Fighting Hawks play in the Ralph Engelstad Arena, a marble-and-bronze rink so lavish that locals half-joke it’s the nicest building in the state. We wandered the campus quad past aerospace students heading to class, a reminder that UND’s aviation program is one of the largest in the country, training pilots for a region built on wide-open sky.

Prairie horizons and grain country

Drive a few minutes in any direction and the city dissolves into the Red River Valley’s flat, fertile farmland, some of the richest soil in North America, striped with sugar beet and wheat fields to the horizon. We took an evening drive out past the grain elevators that punctuate the landscape like small steel cathedrals, the sky doing that huge, theatrical prairie-sunset thing it does out here, with nothing tall enough for miles to interrupt it. It’s a landscape that takes some adjusting to after cities with hills and trees, but there’s a clarifying honesty to a horizon that flat.

Getting There

Grand Forks International Airport sits just south of the city with direct flights from several regional hubs including Denver and Minneapolis-Saint Paul, itself about a five-hour drive southeast via I-94 and I-29. Fargo, roughly 75 miles south on I-29, is the nearest larger airport if you’re weighing options. The city itself is easy to navigate by car, and the Greenway’s paved trail network makes biking a genuinely pleasant way to move between downtown, the river, and the university campus in warmer months.