With temperatures heating up and summer break on the horizon, it’s that time of year again for a beloved Dakota County tradition: Rick’s Bike Sale.

Each spring for the last 16 years, Rick Anderson, the namesake of the sale, and Randy Bailey have poured time, sweat and elbow grease into fixing up donated bikes in order to turn a profit for local organizations. The 17th annual Rick’s Bike Sale kicks off at 10 a.m. Saturday, May 10, in Apple Valley.

There will be some 450 bikes to choose from with all proceeds going to DARTS, a West St. Paul organization that helps seniors live more independent lives, and Kids ‘n Kinship, a program that matches youth with adult volunteers.

“It’s a terrific day that goes by way too fast,” Anderson said in a news release.

Still in Apple Valley, the event will take place at Dick’s Valley Service facility for the second year in a row, rain or shine.

Bicycles for all ages will be for sale, ranging from $20 to $500, including models from Trek, Specialized, Cannondale, Schwinn, Raleigh, Giant and Fuji, per the release.

Road bikes, mountain bikes, cross bikes, city bikes, cruisers, hybrids, BMX and vintage classics can also be found on the lot.

Since its inception, Rick’s Bike Sale has sold thousands of bikes and donated more than $567,000.

“It is very rewarding to see the results of all the hard work volunteers do throughout the year and at the sale,” Anderson said.

Rick’s Bike Sale

What: Over 450 bikes for sale, $20 to $500

When: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., May 10

Where: 5905 Upper 147th St., Apple Valley

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Every year since 1986 – good weather and bad – Tim Lyon has tested the waters of Lake of the Woods or Rainy River on the Minnesota Fishing Opener.

A charter boat driver for Ballard’s Resort on the south shore of Lake of the Woods north of Baudette, Minn., Lyon says he still looks forward to opening day. The Rhode Island native started his career as a Lake of the Woods fishing guide at the Northwest Angle before moving to the south end of the lake, where he’s been a charter boat captain since 2000.

As the May 10 Minnesota Fishing Opener approaches, Lyon says he’s optimistic about fishing prospects on the big lake.

“I’m always optimistic,” said Lyon, 66. “That’s me by nature – not me by biology. I mean, I get to fish (in early) May. I’m always excited about that – especially when you’ve gone through that sort of catharsis of nothing going on over the course of the last several weeks.”

While most Minnesota lakes are ice-free – or will be by the Fishing Opener – Lake of the Woods could be an exception. As of midweek, the U.S. side of the big lake still had a substantial covering of ice, although satellite imagery showed significant areas of open water and cracks. Warm weather in the forecast will erode that even more.

Later ice-out often means lights-out fishing on Lake of the Woods, especially for big fish, as spawning walleyes linger in the Rainy River and adjacent Four-Mile Bay before returning to the main lake.

No promises, but this could be one of those years.

“I always look forward to late springs,” Lyon said. “If I don’t have to go out on the lake and try to chase fish around out there, it’s nice to have that first week in the river. And I think we’ll probably get that, just based on the amount of ice that’s still out there.

“The (water) temperature should be cold enough to still have spawning fish in the river, which always throws some bigger fish into the boat during the course of the opener.”

During years when that happens – 2013 and 2014 stand out in the minds of many anglers – Four-Mile Bay and the mouth of the Rainy can be “just a frenzy of big fish and probably not that many fish the size you can keep,” Lyon said.

Anglers on Lake of the Woods and Rainy River (to the dam at International Falls, Minn.) can keep an aggregate limit of six walleyes and saugers, of which no more than four can be walleyes. All walleyes from 19½ to 28 inches in length must be released, and one trophy walleye longer than 28 inches is allowed.

“I’m more than happy to fish for ego” over eaters, Lyon joked. “So, I look at it optimistically.”

Options abound

As with previous openers, the 500,000 (or so) anglers who hit the water for the storied Minnesota Fishing Opener won’t lack options, whether it’s walleyes or other species such as northern pike, largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, panfish or catfish – a perennial favorite among anglers who fish the Red River.

Undated courtesy photo of Marc Bacigalupi, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources Northwest Region fisheries manager in Bemidji. Minnesota’s 2025 fishing season opens Saturday, May 10, 2025. (Courtesy of Marc Bacigalupi)

No doubt, though, walleyes are the stars of the show on opening day. Fisheries crews for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources are wrapping up their annual walleye egg take operations to supply state stocking programs, said Marc Bacigalupi, Northwest Region fisheries manager for the DNR in Bemidji.

“It’ll be a nice, two-week period where fish are getting ready to bite again” by opening day, Bacigalupi said.

According to the DNR’s spring fishing outlook, Lake of the Woods has a strong population of walleyes in the 13- to 16-inch range, smaller 9- to 11-inch fish and a “high” abundance of walleyes larger than 25 inches.

Anchoring and jigging with a minnow or frozen shiner is the go-to technique for early season walleyes – at least on Lake of the Woods and Rainy River.

“It’s hard to stress how little you want to move and how soft that bite is when it’s cold,” Lyon said.

Another favorite

Upper Red Lake also will be loaded with boats on opening day. For this year, the DNR upped the walleye limit on Upper Red to five fish, with only one over 17 inches allowed. In 2024, anglers on Upper Red were allowed three walleyes, with one over 17 inches, from the May 11 opener through June 14; beginning June 15, 2024, the limit increased to four walleyes, with one over 17 inches allowed.

The limit remained at four walleyes, with one over 17 inches, for the winter 2024-25 fishing season.

According to Evie Evarts, area fisheries supervisor for the DNR in Bemidji, this year’s increased open water limit reflects a series of recent strong year-classes that has resulted in an abundance of smaller walleyes in the population.

The summer regulation allows anglers to keep abundant walleyes while maintaining breeding fish at a level that continues to produce successful year-classes, Evarts said. A year-class refers to fish recruited to the population from a particular year’s hatch.

“We’ve had good year-classes every couple of years now,” Evarts said. “When we had really high brood stock, we weren’t seeing the year-classes, so we’re back to getting good year-classes in there, which is always good for Red.”

By all indications, fishing on the state’s 48,000-acre portion of Upper Red should be good for the opener. The ice on Upper Red was all but gone April 29, with just a small band of shore ice on the south shore of Lower Red, all of which is in tribal waters. Larger post-spawn walleyes likely will be concentrated on the first shoreline break for the opener, so the DNR recommends that anglers have a proper measuring board in the boat to accurately measure the fish they catch.

Walleyes on Red could be “at the tail end of their spawn” on the opener, Evarts says.

“I think it’s going to be good,” she said. “The later the ice goes out on Red, the better it is for fishing. We’re right in that window, so it should be good.”

Closer to Bemidji, shallower lakes likely will offer the best fishing prospects, Evarts says.

“We just lost ice on Lake Bemidji this week – I think it’s all gone – so the water is still going to be pretty cold, I think, for the opener,” she said. “I would say that any of our shallower lakes like Plantagenet and Blackduck, those would all be good starter lakes for the walleye opener.”

Cass Lake, because it’s larger and deeper, generally isn’t a destination lake for the fishing opener, Evarts says, though smaller lakes in the Mississippi River chain, “such as Kitchi and any of those,” would be good bets.

“They’re pretty shallow, and they’re in the river (chain) so they’re going to be warmer,” she said.

Walleyes should be even more recovered from the spawn farther south in Minnesota.

Leech Lake, the other large lake in the DNR’s Northwest Region, also looks promising, with walleye numbers “within or above various management objectives,” the DNR said in its preseason outlook. Anglers can expect to encounter several year-classes of walleyes ranging from 10 inches to 27 inches in length, with the majority being from the 2021 year-class, fish mainly between 15 and 17 inches long.

The DNR offers a full statewide fishing opener preview on its website at mndnr.gov.

Steeped in tradition

Bacigalupi, the Northwest Region fisheries manager, says he’ll be participating in the Minnesota Governor’s Fishing Opener, which this year will be held in the Crosslake chain of lakes area near Brainerd. As an avid walleye angler, he’ll be among the volunteers taking event participants fishing.

The Minnesota Fishing Opener “is a great tradition,” Bacigalupi said.

“It’s about fishing, but it’s also just kind of celebrating the arrival of spring and the tradition of fishing and families having a good excuse to get back together,” he said.

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Maybe the tradition is getting up early; or hitting the water at 12:01 a.m., when the season officially is underway. The Minnesota Fishing Opener is set by statute to open the Saturday two weeks before the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, which this year is May 24.

“It’s something to celebrate,” Bacigalupi said. “You know, our politics are polarized, but it’s still about people knowing that this is still a great place to come and visit and recreate and for our citizens to enjoy our resources that we do work hard at maintaining.”

The Twin Cities may have escaped the severe weather forecast by meteorologists earlier this week, but the metro wasn’t so lucky 60 years ago.

An outbreak of five tornadoes tore through the western and northern suburbs on the evening of May 6, 1965, killing 13 people and injuring hundreds more in what the St. Paul Dispatch described on its front page as a “night of terror.”

A sixth twister struck the area between Glencoe and Lester Prairie, just west of the metro.

The storm’s path of destruction stretched from Sibley County northeast to Anoka County, laying waste to entire neighborhoods in Mounds View, Fridley, Blaine and the area around Lake Minnetonka. Minneapolis and St. Paul were virtually untouched.

The most destructive storm in the metro’s recorded history, it left an estimated $51 million in damage in its wake — more than $500 million after adjusting for inflation.

The tornadoes were spun up by a line of supercell thunderstorms that rolled through the metro that evening, according to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. The terror lasted three hours, from the time the first twister touched down shortly after 6 p.m. until the last one dissipated about 9 p.m.

Winds exceeding 200 mph leveled houses, tore trees from the ground and tossed automobiles around like toys, the Pioneer Press and Dispatch reported. About 1,700 people were left homeless, according to the DNR.

In Mounds View, which was among the hardest hit communities, entire blocks along Lois Lane were reduced to kindling.

Area hospitals were inundated with injured people. Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids, which received about 100 tornado victims, issued an urgent call for surgeons from across the metro. Fifty responded, working until 4 a.m. treating patients.

“The call went out and people came immediately,” assistant administrator Thomas Mattson told the Dispatch. “It goes to show that when tragedy strikes, people do care.”

The death toll likely would have been much higher if not for warnings issued by Civil Defense officials, who for the first time used air raid sirens to alert metro residents to tornadoes in the area, according to the DNR.

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By LINDSEY BAHR, Associated Press

“Top Gun: Maverick” filmmaker Joseph Kosinski came to Formula One like many Americans: “Drive to Survive.”

In that popular Netflix series, he saw the potential for a cinematic event, full of immersive thrills, the high stakes of the competitive racing world and the idea that your teammate could be your greatest rival.

“I don’t think there’s any other sport that’s quite like that,” Kosinski said. “It’s ripe for drama.”

FILE – Actors Brad Pitt, left, and Damson Idris appear on the grid before the British Formula One Grand Prix race at the Silverstone racetrack, Silverstone, England, on July 9, 2023, for the filming of “F1.” (AP Photo/Luca Bruno, File)

The movies have loved car racing since their earliest days, and the popularity of F1 has exploded in recent years. Giving it the “Top Gun” treatment made sense. But it would take nearly four years for that dream to become “F1,” which is speeding into movie theaters on June 27.

It was a complex operation that would involve unprecedented coordination with the league, groundbreaking innovation in camera technology, and letting one of the biggest movie stars in the world, Brad Pitt, drive a real race car at 180 miles an hour on film. Many, many times.

Getting F1 on board

Hollywood, it turned out, was a little easier to convince to make the film than the league. By the time Kosinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer approached them, Pitt had already agreed to star and they’d decided to go with Apple to help make the movie at the level they needed, with the guarantee of a robust theatrical release (which Warner Bros. is handling). Then came the Formula One meeting.

“When you come in, the first thing they think is you’re going to make them look bad,” Bruckheimer said. “I went through this with when I went to the Navy the first time on ‘Top Gun.’”

FILE – Actor Brad Pitt appears on the grid before the British Formula One Grand Prix race at the Silverstone racetrack, Silverstone, England on July 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno, File)

There were many concerns: About anything going wrong, accidents, and the question of the villain. But, the filmmakers explained, this story wasn’t about a villain. It’s a competition between two drivers — a younger driver (Damson Idris) and an older driver (Pitt) trying to make him better.

Bruckheimer said it took almost a year to get the league on board, and then they had to go around to the individual teams to explain it to them as well. But once everyone bought in, they committed and opened their world to the filmmakers.

“The amount of, let’s say, conversations regarding things not related to the actual filmmaking has been massive just from a coordination point of view,” Kosinski said. “But there’s no way we could have made this film without that partnership with Formula One.”

An image of actor Brad Pitt from the upcoming film “F1” is reflected in an advertisement for Tom Cruise’s new film “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” on the opening day of CinemaCon, the official convention of Cinema United, on Monday, March 31, 2025, at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

Among the things they got to do: Build a garage at the Grand Prix for their fictional team; Drive on the track during Grand Prix weekends in front of hundreds of thousands of spectators; Put their Formula One cars on the track with the film’s cars (and drivers); Have Pitt and Idris stand at the end of the national anthem in both Silverstone and Abu Dhabi; And sit in on drivers meetings and technical briefings.

“It was full-on integration of these two worlds coming together,” Kosinski said. “There’s no way the film could have happened or look like it does without that partnership. I think you’ll see the result of that on screen because you couldn’t recreate what we were able to capture by doing it for real.”

“We’re going to need a smaller camera”

In true “Top Gun” spirit, part of “doing it for real” meant trying to create the experience in the driver seat for the audience. Seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton, who was involved in the film from the earliest days, told Kosinski that he’d never seen a film that had really captured what it felt like to be in one of those cars.

“These Formula One cars, they deal in grams,” Kosinski said. “Adding 100 pounds of camera equipment works against the very thing you’re trying to capture. It became a technical engineering project for a year to figure out how to get very tiny cameras that are IMAX quality onto one of these cars.”

Ferrari driver Lewis Hamilton of Britain steers his car during the Formula One Saudi Arabian Grand Prix at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Sunday, April 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Darko Bandic)

During “Top Gun: Maverick,” they had six Sony cameras inside the cockpit. Here, engineers were able to slim those down to about a quarter of the size (he estimates a 10×10 cm cube). Panavision also developed a remote control that allowed director of photography Claudio Miranda to pivot the cameras left and right, which they didn’t have on “Maverick.”

They had 15 camera mounts built into the cars and were able to run up to four at a time keeping the weight penalty to a minimum, and the close-ups real.

“Every time you see Brad or Damson’s face, they’re really driving that car,” Kosinski said. “It’s not being driven for them.”

And once it was go-time on the tracks, it was a race against the clock.

“It was a technical feat and an organizational feat,” Bruckheimer said. “You get limited access and we’d get in there between some of their qualifying laps and have eight minutes to get on the track and off the track. It’s precision, you can’t be at nine minutes.”

F1 driver Lewis Hamilton reacts during the official opening of the brand-new flagship Fanatics Collectibles store on Regent Street in London, Friday April 25, 2025. (Bradley Collyer/PA via AP)

When Hamilton first saw some of their racing footage cut together, Kosinski got a confidence boost.

“He smiled and said, ‘It looks fast,’” Kosinski said. “I was like, ‘Oh, thank God.’ If Lewis says that we’re in a good place.”

The Brad Pitt factor

“This movie needed an icon kind of at the center of it,” Kosinski said. “It’s a big, complicated, expensive film. And I needed one of our, you know, top, top movie stars.”

Kosinski knew Pitt liked cars. About a decade ago he, Tom Cruise and Pitt actually developed a car movie that never came to be. Plus, he said, “I just felt like it was a role that I always wanted to see him play.”

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Brad Pitt in a scene from “F1.” (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

The character is fictional driver named Sonny Hayes who was “the greatest who never was.” A phenomenon in the 1990s, he was destined to be the next world champion before an accident at a Grand Prix ends his Formula One career.

“Now he drives in every type of racing league you could imagine, but not Formula 1,” Kosinski said, from Le Mans to swamp trucks. “He likes to challenge himself to a new racing league and master it, but then he walks away.”

The audience meets him driving the midnight shift at the Daytona 24 hour race where he meets his old teammate and now Formula One team owner (Javier Bardem) who asks him to come back to help them win one race to save them from being sold.

“It’s a story about a last place team, a group of underdogs, and Sonny Hayes in his later years having one more chance to do something he was never able to, which is win a race in F1,” Kosinski said.

After the pitch, they went to the racetrack with Hamilton and Pitt “was hooked.”

Pitt trained for three months before cameras started rolling to get used to the physical demands of the precision vehicles. He and his co-star really drove the cars at speeds up to 180 mph, and sometimes in front of a couple hundred thousand people.

“The happiest day was when they said, ‘OK, it’s a wrap on driving,’ and he (Brad) climbed out of the car,” Bruckheimer said. “That was the best day for me because it is dangerous, it really is.”

The perfect summer blockbuster?

The film, everyone has acknowledged, was enormously expensive. They had the advantage of advertising on the cars, which helped offset some of the costs, but the operation was akin to building a real F1 team, Bruckheimer said. They built six cars, which they transported all around the world along with production.

“It’s like an army exercise moving vast groups of people and machinery around the world,” Bruckheimer said.

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But it was much less than the $300 million figure going around, both Kosinski and Bruckheimer said.

“It’s expensive, don’t get me wrong. It’s an expensive movie. But it was substantially lower than that number,” Bruckheimer said. “Hollywood is a very competitive place, and our friends sometimes inflate our budgets to make them look better.”

The biggest question is whether audiences will turn out in blockbuster numbers. So far, test scores have been very high across genders. And they promise you don’t need to be an expert or even a fan of the sport to enjoy the film, which will teach you everything you need to know.

“It’s emotional, it’s exciting, it has humor. It’s got great music with a Hans Zimmer score and a bunch of phenomenal artists,” Bruckheimer said. “We hope it’s a perfect summer movie.”