Where the Lakers Come Inland RoadyGoat
Duluth sits at the very tip of Lake Superior, the farthest-inland seaport reachable by oceangoing ships, some 2,300 miles from the Atlantic by way of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway. Guarding its harbor is the Aerial Lift Bridge, an icon that started life in 1905 as one of America's only transporter bridges, then was rebuilt in 1929-30 into a vertical-lift span that rises about 135 feet in roughly a minute, lifting thousands of times a year so freighters can pass beneath. And Duluth has a musical claim to fame: Bob Dylan was born here in 1941 as Robert Zimmerman, spending his first years in town before his family moved up to Hibbing on the Iron Range. A working port on the world's greatest freshwater lake, with a folk legend's first cry, that's Duluth, perched on the edge of an inland sea.