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You know those 10,000 lakes that Minnesota brags about? From the air, says Natalie Higdon of Ponte Vedra Beach, it sure looks as if there are at least that many.

She's 22, an Ohio State University student, and this week she and a couple of college teammates are cruising low over America in a single-engine prop plane. From 1,000 and 2,000 feet, they've had prime views of the Blue Ridge Mountains of western Maryland, the farmland of the Midwest, the big Mississippi River and the Great Plains.

By Friday afternoon, they should be landing in the high desert of Santa Fe, N.M. There they will stop, relish their achievement, then fly back to college.

Higdon is captain of a three-woman Ohio State team that's part of the Air Race Classic, an all-women race that dates back to the 1929 Women's Air Derby, in which Amelia Earhart was a contestant (she finished third). That event was perhaps better known by Will Rogers' jokey name for it, the Powder Puff Derby.

The 2017 race has 112 pilots and 52 planes, including the Ohio State team's rented Cirrus SR20, which has five seats and air-conditioning, but no bathroom.

The planes left Tuesday, 30 seconds apart, from the western Maryland city of Frederick, bound 2,648 miles to the finish line in Santa Fe. They took a route that crosses a chunk of the Midwest, heads north almost to the Canadian border in Bemidji, Minn., then veers south to Oklahoma before jogging west to the finish.

Strategy is a big part of the race: Each crew can fly as much or as little in a day as they want, but they all have to be in Santa Fe by 5 p.m. Friday.

Each plane is timed: The trick, Higdon said, is figuring out when to fly to get the best winds, to cut down on the total flight time.

For the Ohio State crew, the first leg, from Frederick to Coshocton, Ohio, was a bouncy, tough one. Strong headwinds made for an average of just 155 mph (once on the ground, though, the people of Coshocton gave their local team a hero's welcome).

The plane made that up by averaging 200 mph in a nice headwind from Indianapolis to Decorah, Iowa.

By Wednesday the team made it to Bemidji without many problems, though winds made the landing more difficult than usual. Thursday morning they delayed takeoff by seven hours to avoid bad thunderstorms. Even so, they had to detour west around storms to get their next stop.

"We just landed in Spencer," Higdon said by phone from Iowa Thursday afternoon. "We're just taxiing right now."

She said that even with that delay, it shouldn't be a problem getting to Santa Fe on time.

During the race, she's handling all the logistical matters, not flying: She's leaving that to head pilot Aly Bond and co-pilot Josie Cotugno. She will help pilot, though, on the return to Ohio.

Higdon is a 2013 graduate of Bishop Kenny High School, and she'll graduate from college in August. She plans to go to flight school in North Carolina, and hopes to get a job as an instructor before eventually become a commercial airline pilot.

She's the immediate past president of the Women in Aviation chapter at Ohio State, which tries to encourage women to join the field.

"Only six percent of pilots are women in the United States," she said. "We're competing to create visibility for women in pilot roles. A lot of people, little girls, don't think they can do it, because they haven't seen a female pilot before."

That wasn't ever an issue for: Her mother, Florence Sanders, is a pilot for FedEx.

As for Higdon, she's long known that flying is what she wants to do. At 15, that really set in when she first took the controls of a seaplane, alongside an instructor, during a family vacation in Alaska.

"Everybody in aviation who's a pilot will tell you this," she said. "It just clicks. That's it — I want to be a pilot."