Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
St. Cloud Rock City
Can an all-ages music club revitalize St. Cloud’s struggling downtown? That’s what Chris Riemenschneider wonders over at the Star Tribune today, looking at the success of the B-Side Indie Music Cafe. That music space will soon be joined by a community space run by the Wirth Center for the Performing Arts. (It’s wild to remember that Minneapolis once had an all-ages club right on First Avenue in downtown.)
As Riemenschneider writes, dedicating downtown to the arts is something of a trend among Minnesota cities, with similar plans taking shape in Winona and Detroit Lakes. “We’re really trying to bring that social aspect to creativity,” says the Wirth Center’s James Newman. “It’s not just for artists. It’s for people that just want something to do other than go to the bar.” Well, OK, but have they considered just inviting a bunch of drunks in from the suburbs every weekend? That seems to be the Minneapolis plan.
Red Panda Is Back!
Rong Niu, known professionally as “Red Panda,” has been entertaining crowds during professional basketball games for over 30 years, balancing atop a 10-foot-tall unicycle while flipping bowls from her feet onto her head.
But Niu was forced to take a brief hiatus after falling off her unicycle and breaking her left wrist last July during the WNBA Commissioner’s Cup final between the Minnesota Lynx and the Indiana Fever. (Her manager later attributed the incident to bike damage sustained in transit.) Now healed, Niu has started popping up at events. She’ll make her Minnesota return this Saturday at St. Thomas’s brand-new (mildly controversial in a nimby/parking kind of way) arena, when the men's basketball team goes up against the Army's Black Knights. Tommies’ b-ball coach Johnny Tauer tells the Daily Agenda that hosting her Minnesota comeback is a “pinch-me moment.”
PARKLIFE!
If you want a glimpse at what our national parks are up against, have a look at this thorough story from Gracie Stockton at MPR News about a Minnesota family that thought it would be fun to “roadschool” their kids for a year. Jen Goepfert and Travis Pedersen set out last fall with their fourth grade twins, Aela and Eva, using a curriculum based in part on the national parks’ Junior Ranger program. And then the Trump administration happened.
“There's a big part in almost every Junior Ranger book: talk to a ranger and ask them about their job,” Goepfert says. “And it was harder and harder to find rangers to do that.”
In the end, Aela and Eva got a lesson their parents might not have planned: How federal neglect of our parks threatens our national heritage.
RIP to Midwest Mountaineering's Rod Johnson
In similarly sad outdoors news, Alex Chhith at the Star Tribune has a touching memorial of adventurer and longtime Midwest Mountaineering owner Rod Johnson, who died October 26 after an accident at his home. He was 76 years old.
Here's how Chhith's story begins:
Traveling up to the summit of Mount McKinley, Rod Johnson had something unusual in his pack: liters of wine.
Johnson and his crew climbed to the peak more than 20,000 feet above sea level and celebrated with a swig before they went back down the Alaskan mountain, also known as Denali, said his longtime friend and business associate Rudi Hargesheimer.
“He drank it up there as a lark because he thought it was crazy and he wanted to do something different,” Hargesheimer said. “But climbing Mount McKinley is no easy feat; it was an adrenaline adventure.”
RIP, Rod! We're certain you'll be just as missed as Midwest Mountaineering has been since closing in 2023. Probably even more so.
