Driving to, and exploring Fairbanks, Alaska
It’s already Day 7 of the tour – time does indeed fly when you’re having fun 🙂 Today the group takes the Alaska Railroad to Denali National Park while I go ahead in the bus. There’s a light rain falling but that’s forecast to quit soon. Let’s catch up on what happened the past couple of days.
Blogging in my hotel room at Tok, at 04:20 am. Sleep is overrated…
The view up the Alaska Highway from the hotel.
We stopped for a look at the lovely little chapel at Dot Lake.
We don’t have any snakes in Alaska but this stick in the lake sure made me stop! 🙂
The next stop was at Delta Junction, the official end of the Alaska Highway, Mile 1,422 from the start in Dawson Creek, British Columbia.
Across the street from the Visitor Center there’s a display of equipment used to build the highway, including this 1942 Studebaker, as well as a farmer’s market.
Lunch at Rika’s Roadhouse Historic Park is always an excellent stop – the food as well as the museums.
This is the bridge that carries the Trans Alaska oil pipeline across the Tanana River.
This moose and calf took a bit of work to get to. There was no place to pull off the highway far enough that I considered it safe so I went a couple of miles to a rest area and did a U-turn, came back to a parking spot and we all walked a couple of blocks to a good viewing spot.
A mini moose-jam along the Richardson Highway 🙂
Santa Claus House at the community of North Pole is always a fun stop.
Santa’s reindeer.
There was a very strong display of aurora borealis this night, but as you can see from this shot taken from my hotel room just after midnight, it doesn’t get dark and it was cloudy in any case.
Sunday was Fairbanks tour day, starting with Golden Heart Park on the Chena River towntown.
A pipeline viewing area has been set up along the Steese Highway, with good interpretive displays.
The Trans Alaska pipeline snaking through the forest north of Fairbanks. This is Mile 450 of the 800-mile-long pipeline.
This sign across the highway from the pipeline viewing area used to be on the hill right above the pipeline, with a Sarah Palin election poster attached to it.
We had a 10:30 reservation at Gold Dredge #8, which I discovered has a new owner and has been completely redesigned. This train which now takes visitors into the property came from the Eldorado Gold Mine, a tourist operation that has now closed.
A young prospector seen from the train.
The narrator did an excellent job of describing the mining done in the Fairbanks area.
Dredge #8.
The group trying their hand at panning for gold. Everyone got a bit to take home.
The major tour of the day was on the Riverboat Discovery, which begins with a display of bush plane flying. A couple of years ago the pilot crashed beside the boat, but yesterday’s display went much better!
Each year, more and more large homes appear on the slopes above the Chena River.
A stop is made at the late Susan Butcher’s sled dog kennel. These huskies were born to run!
The meeting of the Chena and Tanana Rivers. The muddy Tanana is the world’s longest glacier-fed river as well as being the largest tributary of the Yukon River.
An hour-long stop is made at this cultural camp, Chena Village, where everyone gets off the boat to attend short talks on hunting and trapping, making clothes and shelters, and sled dogs.
Rather than go to a restaurant tonight, we stopped at a grocey store and put together our own meal, with barbecued chicken and salads. Our suites at the Wedgewood Resort are large enough to easily handle a group this size for dinner, and it was an excellent way to end the day.
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