After our adventures in Tok and Chicken we got back on Alaska Highway 3 and headed towards Fairbanks. Along the way we were able to view the mountains of the Alaskan Range and were experienced enough now to discern the difference between the areas that had permafrost and those that did not. The trees and vegetation are extremely stunted in the permafrost areas. Even after being here for over a month now we can’t get over how vast and scenic Alaska is!
When we got to the Fairbanks area, we settled into a room at Eielson Air Force Base. Then off to visit a place called North Pole, Alaska. This is a real place and the residents there promote it constantly. It all started when a couple named Con and Nellie Miller arrived in Fairbanks, Alaska in 1949. Con became a merchant and fur buyer in the surrounding native villages. He would put on an old red Santa suit each Christmas as he made his rounds and earned a bit of a celebrity status as Santa Claus in the eyes of the village children - the very first St. Nick any of them had ever seen.
After a few years, the Millers had decided to build their own trading post thirteen miles south of Fairbanks, in an area newly dubbed "North Pole". Then one day, while Con was hard at work on the new store, a young native Alaskan boy recognized Con and said, "Hello, Santa Claus! Are you building a new house?" The thought stuck and the new store ended up being called the "Santa Claus House!"
Now many years after it started it is quite the tourist (trap) attraction and the entire town feeds off of it in many ways. Quite a few of the businesses have adopted the North Pole theme and you will see gift shops, welding shops, light poles, homes and all sorts of other businesses decorated as if it was Christmas. And if you make the trip to visit the real-life North Pole, it would be hard to miss seeing jolly old Santa Claus. There are currently three white-whiskered men who don the big red suit and sit in the big Santa chair. One of them being the president of the local chamber of commerce who even legally changed his name to Santa Claus.
Yes, boys and girls, the North Pole is not only real, but has the motto - "Where the spirit of Christmas lives year around.” It is the home to the Santa Claus House where children's letters are received and promptly answered, candycane-striped street lights line Santa Claus Lane and St. Nicholas Drive, not to mention a 45-foot-tall Santa surrounded by fencing topped with barbed wire welcome the visitors. It's safe to say the 2,200 residents of North Pole dream of sugar plum fairies and the coming tourist season on a nightly basis.
Fairbanks is not a large city by any means but is the largest in the interior region of Alaska with about 33,000 hearty souls. One thing we found interesting here in Alaska is that they have boroughs rather than counties or parishes. And being Alaska, they are big – the Denali Borough covers an area about the size of West Virginia. I don’t believe that I would want to spend a winter here being just 120 miles from the Artic Circle – it would make North Dakota seem like the Banana Belt.
The history of Fairbanks, the second-largest city in Alaska, can be traced to the founding of a trading post on the south bank of the Chena River on August 26, 1901. It’s really like any small city in the states, only further north. I couldn’t help but smile when I heard (multiple times, mind you) the local folks tell the tourists - “We are part of the United States.” Then with a side look of disgust and a mumbled “dumbass” they would return to their work with a smile.
It turns out that Fairbanks has an antler arch similar to the one in Jackson, Wyoming. Only this one is made from over 100 moose and caribou antlers rather than elk. If you are ever in downtown Fairbanks along the Chena River you should check this out. It is very Alaskana!
Also there are a number of other attractions in the downtown area with one being the SS Nenana. It is a five-deck, western style river sternwheeler paddle ship. You can wander through it at your leisure and check out all the interesting stories throughout. It is 237 feet long and 42 feet wide and she was rated for loads of 1,000 tons. I kind of fell for the name Nenana. Pronounced Ne-na-na, it is the name of the river that runs through Denali. But the sternwheeler Nenana sits in a park now, for the locals to play on and the tourists to ogle – no more water for this old girl.
All the public restrooms in the downtown area have the women and men signs dressed for the normal weather for Alaska and is something you don’t see in the lower 48. We thought it was kind of cute.
In the downtown park, where we wandered around, there is a memorial to the Women Air Force Service Pilots from World War II. As I read the informational kiosks, I learned some things that I had only briefly heard about but never took the time to appreciate. The female pilots of the WASP ended up numbering 1,074, each freeing up a male pilot for combat service and duties. They flew over 60 million miles in every type of military aircraft.
Thirty-eight WASP fliers lost their lives while serving during the war, all in accidents. Eleven died in training and twenty-seven on active duty. Because they were not considered military under the existing guidelines, a fallen WASP was sent home, at the families expense, without traditional military honors or a note of heroism. The army, at that time, would not allow the U.S. flag to be placed on the coffin of a fallen WASP.
After reading this, even I was humbled!
The further north we came the more native Alaskans we ran into. The natives to the Fairbanks region are Athabascan Indians. Though there was never a permanent Alaska Native settlement at the site of Fairbanks, the Athabascan Indians have used the area for thousands of years. A bit longer than we have been in the area.
We made a stop one day at a small wildlife refuge in the area because we had heard there were quite the gathering of Sandhill Cranes there. It is Alaska's largest game bird, and yes, they are hunted here – where they are protected in most other areas. Residents of the Yukon Delta area have affectionately nicknamed it the “Sunday Turkey”.
They are one of the most comical birds we know of when doing their famous “mating dance”. We saw a couple of the young males practicing while we were there – it is rather entertaining.
While in Fairbanks I got caught up in the hype of a tour venue and “just had to go!”
“Hop aboard a narrow gauge train and stake your claim to gold on this two-hour tour of Gold Dredge Number 8. Learn how 100,000 gold rushers fought the permafrost in their quest to get rich—then grab some gold of your own!” They had me hook, line, and sinker!
We arrived at the location early - and being the first ones there had to wait around for a while, taking pictures of the Alaskan Pipeline and checking out the cute little train depot thinking that we were going to have a quaint little tour – then reality hit. Tour bus after tour bus started arriving – cruise ship people! They just kept coming! Princess, Royal Caribbean, Holland America, and even Celebrity, just to name a few – we were trapped in cruise ship tourist hell. So at the predesignated time we boarded our (not so little) narrow gauge train to the exclamations of “Where’s the coffee?”, “Where’s the donuts?”, and the often repeated, “When is Happy Hour?” with our thousand “new friends” who were happily snapping selfies with any inanimate or animate object within reach. (I think Lee’s number of new friends are a bit high, but it was overwhelming!!)
It turns out that this entire operation is owned by Holland America Tours and is set up to dredge the gold out of the cruise ship tourists pockets – “There’s gold in them thar old people.” (Yes, I have to admit we were two of them.) Even with all the “new friends” we really did enjoy the tour of Gold Dredge #8 and the methods of hydraulic mining. The dredge is quite the mechanical wonder. It “walked” across the gold fields, scooping up pay dirt and mechanically panning it. It had a huge conveyor belt of gargantuan metal scoops that carved out huge sections of earth as it pulled itself along at a snails pace.
This thing was never moved around to other sites and once it was assembled here – here is where it stayed. In its entire lifetime it only moved 4.5 miles dredging gold as it went and produced a little over 7.5 million ounces of gold.
I had thought that this massive machine had been steam powered. My first surprise came when our tour guide informed us that Gold Dredge #8, as well as the others in Alaska, were electric. He then went into detail of how the gold company had built a power plant in the city of Fairbanks and had run a giant extension cord from which to run their dredges. This same electric power plant is still in use in Fairbanks today, almost 100 years later.
These things used huge amounts of water and the gold companies had to build pump houses near the area to supply the dredge with the 6,000 gallons-per-minute it needed to operate – and this was on a 24/7 basis!
The dredge was built on top of a huge barge and didn’t have a propulsion system of its own. Its only moving parts were the gang buckets (which helped drag it forward) in front of the barge and a large cement mixer-like a rotating steel drum containing thousands of quarter inch holes through which the water, sand, silt, and gold flowed through. Also the conveyor belts, which then were used to carry out the worthless rock and debris.
Here is a photo inside the ship's wheelhouse with the recently certified and fully in control Dredge Master, Belinda. She could use these controls to control the speed and depth of the gang buckets and the orientation of the barge.
Included in the tour was a quick lesson in gold panning. Here they had literally hundreds of troughs set up – gave you a little poke of “paydirt” and taught you how to separate the gold from the dirt. I think we ended up with about $22 worth of real (planted) gold between the two of us. If you happened to catch the fever while doing this the tour company would gladly sell you additional pokes at about $25 dollars each.
So with a short train ride back to the parking lot lined with multitudes of cruise line tour buses, we found our little rental car and headed back to Fairbanks to plan our next great experience. The riverboat Discovery on the Chena River!
We’ve been on our share of boat rides at tourist spots around the country and were looking forward to this one when we found out about it. If you are ever in the area this is one well thought out and well run experience. It's a show along the river... not just a boat ride. It's all about the culture and history of Alaska and what I would consider a must for a Fairbanks visit.
As we left the dock we saw one of Alaska's bush pilots taking off and landing right from the river right up close to the boat. At a riverside fish camp, we learned how Alaska natives traditionally prepared salmon for smoking and drying. They even gave us a sample of Captain Jim's smoked salmon (tasted like fish!). Further down the river we stopped by one of the Iditarod dog kennels, run by the family of the late Iditarod champion, Susan Butcher. There we were treated to how the dogs are kept and trained - and watched a “training sled” being pulled by the dogs. The training sled was an old stripped down ATV with the engine removed.
We stopped at, and were able to get a guided tour, at a Chena Indian Village where native Alaskan guides took us around their Athabascan village, while explaining how everything worked and about their heritage. We did learn quite a lot during the tour – the native Alaskans providing the tours were all young people - college educated in the lower 48 - then came back home to earn a bit of money during the tourist season and tease any Texans they could identify. They do seem to make quite the sport of that up here.
We enjoyed Fairbanks but it was time to move on once again.
The main attraction for us during our stay in Alaska was Denali National Park and Preserve. It encompasses over 6 million acres of Alaska’s interior wilderness with only one main (sometimes harrowing) road winding into its center. The centerpiece of the park is 20,310 feet high Mount Denali (formally known as Mount McKinley), North America’s tallest peak. With its terrain of tundra, spruce forest, mountains and glaciers, the park is home to an array of spectacular wildlife including grizzly bears, wolves, moose, caribou and Dall sheep.
You can only drive about 15 miles into the park before you need a special permit or you hop on one of the shuttle or tour buses. We did drive that allowed stretch repeatedly while we were there and spotted quite the number of animals.
The pretty little guy above is a Ptarmigan that is just starting to change into his fall/winter colors. In the winter time he is pure white. We were walking one of the paths in the park and he let me walk right up to him and take this photo.
This bull caribou just happened to be grazing near a river as we were driving by. There are lots of these guys and gals in the park and I’m sure we had seen at least 50 in various locations during our visit. They are the wild version of reindeer - or put the other way Reindeer are the domesticated version of the Caribou.
A young female moose that came and visited one day.
We took one of the tour buses to get back further into the park and so glad that we did. Once you get in as far into the park as they allow you to drive the road turns to narrow, curvy dirt with no guard rails. The shuttle and tour buses go an additional 75 miles on these roads viewing the scenery and wildlife as they go. We only went in about 50 miles or so more further on the tour bus than what we could drive. This view is of Polychrome Canyon as we rode those narrow, curvy, no guardrail dirt roads. Some pretty shear drops on those roads also. But we did see lots of bear, caribou, Dall sheep and moose along the way.
One of the Grizzly Bears that we saw on the tour. It kind of looks like he is answering that age old question of “Does a bear poop in the woods?”
One of the things that caught my attention as we wandered some of the trails in the park was the amount of people who had bells tied into their shoes or clothes. It is supposed to make enough noise so the bears don’t bother you. We have been told by park rangers that this does not really work and the only purpose it serves is to identify which bear has been eating tourists by the number of bells in their scat (poop). They act more like a dinner bell to the bears – the small chunky tourists are the bears favorite ones.
The soft jingle of bells as you walk through the forest does put you a bit into the Christmas spirit though.
On one of our drives into the park we saw a ranger putting up signs to warn the tourist of the upcoming rut for the moose population. We didn’t think much of it until just a short distance down the road were two bull moose – not in the fighting spirit yet, just meandering along. This is the guy that came out right in front of the car. When he was standing on the pavement his hump had to have been close to 7 feet. An up close and personal perspective is pretty awesome!
One thing that we have been battling since we arrived in Alaska has been the weather. The clouds and rain have been ever-present, and for people that love the sunshine, this has been a bit tough. We were told early on that our chances of seeing the entire Mount Denali were about 1 in 6. Of the 5 weeks we have been here we only heard of one small time frame that the mountain was not covered in clouds and we were no where close. But one of the last days here the mountain gave us just a little peek and a promise that it is not going anywhere. I guess we will just have to come back.
We’re bank in Anchorage now doing a few last minute things before we end this Alaska adventure and head on back to the lower 48. It has been cloudy, wet and cold but we have enjoyed it all and learned so much from this place called Alaska.
We hope you have enjoyed our little adventure and when you next hear from us it will be back to the RV life.
Home – will be - where we park it!
Lee & Linda
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