Winona, Minnesota, Icon

Sugar Loaf, Winona, Minnesota, FebruaryWinona, Minnesota’s icon is Sugar Loaf, a rocky prominence in the Mississippi bluffs left standing when quarrying stopped many years ago. It is not a natural feature, but nonetheless a rather fetching one that now appears on local tourism brochures, corporate logos and promotions of all kinds.

Since it is usually depicted in raking sunlight or framed in colorful fall trees, I wanted something different when I photographed for my part of the local Minnesota Marine Art Museum’s “Portrait and Place” show in 2011. What does it look like from other angles, I wondered? In less flattering light? Early on I zeroed in on a good view of Sugar Loaf and the edge of town energy from the Fleet Farm parking lot along U.S. 14/61, and then watched for the right moment, the right light. 

It came on a foggy, zero-degree February day with the parking lot glazed in road salt. With the truck heater left on full, I raised my tripod to about eight feet above the pavement, ducked in to warm up, set up the camera, made my exposures, warmed my hands, and finished, cold to the bone.

The traffic island created a counterpoint to the pinnacle of Sugar Loaf, and for me at least, the whole of it created a sense of a workaday Minnesota river town beginning to think about spring.