Fairbanks, Alaska...land of the midnight sun

Crud-covered car. Nice.

On Thursday, the 26th of June, we loaded up the crust-covered car and headed west to Fairbanks. The weather improved with each passing mile and by the time we reached Delta Junction (the official end of the Alaska Highway) the skies were mostly clear and sunny. As we approached the outskirts of Fairbanks, our large animal sightings took off! We saw a mother moose and her calf munching in tall grass next to the road but by the time we recognized what we were seeing, we had passed without getting a picture. A few miles later we saw another moose snacking behind some trees…and then a wolf jogged across the road up ahead! Wow. And still no pictures for proof!

At the campground,
well after 10pm

We pulled into Fairbanks and the traffic increased substantially compared to the emptiness of the last week and a half on the roads. We set up camp at the Chena River Wayside State Recreation Site, a nice park with lots of tall spruces, paper birches and a million mosquitoes.  The campground is centrally located to shopping, restaurants and sightseeing. We headed out to pick up some groceries, made dinner, had an extended happy hour, and sacked out.

On Friday, we hit a couple of the local thrift stores (now a required sightseeing stop in every city that has them). Ken was in desperate need of a haircut, so we stopped by a little local shop for a cut and some interesting conversation.  Joe the barber regaled us with how he wound up in Alaska from his boyhood home in Sumter, South Carolina. In a Southern drawl so thick you’d have thought he left last week, Joe has lived in Alaska since 1968, cutting hair all that time. He was encouraged by a couple of GIs who told him about the state and so made his way here, though he was asked repeatedly what he was running from. Apparently folks who are running from the law, bad debts, an ex-spouse or some other nefarious deed, are apt to make their way to this vast and wild place to hide. Turns out Joe was just looking for a nice place to live. 

Downtown Fairbanks at 11:26 at night!

After the haircut, we ate lunch across the street at a Thai restaurant whose main ingredients were fish sauce and little else. Yuck. In any case, later in the day we returned to the coach for a quick nap, dinner, and the required happy hour.

Taken at 10:30pm

Around 10:30pm we decided to go for a walk in the pleasant evening air. The sun hadn’t set and, in fact, was so bright sunglasses were required. We took pictures of our long shadows and then walked around a bit more enjoying the weather. With the sun no lower in the sky, we drove into downtown to look for a bank sign showing the time of night with the sunlit sky behind it and found several willing candidates. By 11:45pm, with the sun still so bright we had to squint, we returned to the RV too tired to stay up to watch the sun actually set. Ha!

Tanana Valley Farmers Market

On Saturday, we awoke early and made our way to the Tanana Valley Farmers Market, a thrice weekly affair with scores of artisans, farmers, potters, photographers and woodworkers. We wandered around the tents and chatted with the proprietors. We touched all the knitted and crocheted items, smelled all the soaps and admired the artwork. (And by ‘we’, I mean ‘I’.) Alaska is known for its award winning cabbages and other leafy veggies, so Ken bought some beautiful greens for dinner.

Historic Log Cabin at the
Fairbanks Visitors Center

We headed downtown to the Morris Thompson Visitor Center, a gorgeous building with an extensive museum about Interior Alaska’s people, land and culture, as well as convention space, a gift shop, an artistans’ workshop and a historic log cabin out front . We picked up a few more brochures to add to the obscene number we already have with the intention of returning later. What little we saw was very impressive and we look forward to seeing the rest. We dashed off for lunch in downtown at Soapy Smith's Pioneer Restaurant, a big place offering standard pub fare with reasonable prices (at least for Alaska).

Sandhill Cranes

Creamer's Field

In the afternoon, we headed to Creamer's Field, a former dairy farm that operated until 1966, then bought by the community for use as a migratory waterfowl refuge in 1970. Now, with more than 2000 acres of fields, woods and wetlands reserved for them, thousands of different birds summer here on the fields where the cows used to graze. We walked along one of the paths and saw a big group of juvenile sandhill cranes enjoying a little pond in the middle of the plowed land. 

With the requisite happy hour under our belts, we spent the rest of the evening catching up on chores, doing some grocery shopping and eating dinner. What a pleasant day!

Musk Ox

On Sunday, we rolled out of bed and drove to the Large Animal Research Station (LARS), part of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. The LARS offers guided tours of their big animalia, namely musk oxen, reindeer and caribou, for a fee. Viewing from the parking lot is free, so we tried that, since the center is actually closed on Sundays. We could see some musk oxen way off in the distance…and then we saw one nearby in the woods! These funny looking beasts resemble dark brown mops with curled horns that look like a big whitish uni-brow. Their underhair, called qiviut, is harvested by native groups and spun into yarn because it compares in softness, quality and warmth to cashmere.

Ken and Santa

Moving right along, we headed out to the North Pole. Well, not the true North Pole, or even the magnetic North Pole, but the Town of North Pole, just southeast of Fairbanks about 12 miles east.

Santa Claus House, North Pole, Alaska

This crazy little place celebrates Christmas year-round, complete with candy canes adorning businesses, Christmas lights strung on the houses, and Season’s Greetings banners hanging from the streetlights. And all the streets have Christmas themed names. We turned onto St. Nicholas Lane to visit the Santa Claus House. This place is a giant Christmas tourist trap swimming in ornaments, tinsel and evergreen boughs. It was very entertaining. This also happens to be Santa’s mailing address for all the letters written by kids across the country. A large number of these adorable letters were posted up around the place pleading for one toy or the other…so cute.

The Screaming Weasel gift shop

After quite a while, we managed to extricate ourselves from the merriment and head to lunch at Little Richard’s 50s Diner, a greasy spoon with tasty food. Ken ordered the wild game skillet, offering sausages of reindeer and caribou mixed in scrambled eggs and cheese. Very tasty and filling. We crossed the street to visit the Screaming Weasel, a loudly painted building stuffed with locally made arts and crafts of all kinds. We chatted with the store owner about her artists and looked around the VERY crowded little space at all the stuff.

From there, we headed back to Fairbanks on scenic back roads and though we saw some pretty countryside, we found no moose. We drove up one back road and down another, but they all hid from us.

Museum of the North

We ended up at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks campus once more and made our way to their Museum of the North. It’s a beautiful structure with a spectacular view of the city and beyond. We watched three different films about various Alaskan topics. 

Iron Ravens

The first film, Dynamic Aurora, addressed the mechanics and beauty of the aurora borealis, or northern lights. Evidently they are controlled by the magnetic field of the earth and occur all year long at both the North and South Poles. One of the best places to view them is Fairbanks...but only in the dead of winter when the sunlight doesn't blot them from the sky. The northern lights are tiny bits of energy released by the collision of ions from the sun and molecules in the atmosphere. These bits of energy are much like the tiny spark of static electricity, but accumulated over millions and millions of collisions they appear as a dancing curtain of light in greens, blues and reds over hundreds of miles high in the night sky.

Native Alaskan clothing

The second film, You Are Here, highlighted the architecture of the museum building itself and its connection symbolically to the Alaskan landscape, with sweeping lines (representing diving whales and huge mountains) and narrowing spaces leading to windows (representing the light of summer and darkness of winter). Still other interior features represent the jagged edges of ice formations and glaciers, while the collections themselves exhibit the huge variety of cultures, animals and nature of the state.

Figurines carved in ivory

The third film, Winter, answered all non-Alaskans' questions about the cold here. Interviews with Alaskans of various backgrounds showed their feelings about the cold and dark of winter. Many mentioned that it isn't really 'cold' until it reaches 50 degrees below zero. Right. And that they enjoy the winter, in many cases, more than the summer for the ease of travel and the variety of activities available. The lack of sunlight does cause quite a bit of cabin fever and lethargy, so most of the interviewees mentioned needing to stay active as a way of combating that.

Tlingit totem

Ken with Otto the Grizzly Bear

We toured the exhibit hall and saw all manner of animals from the interior of the country as well as examples of the artistry and clothing of some of the native cultures. Upstairs we found an extensive art collection featuring paintings, ivory carvings, wood carvings, fiber art, and even a decorated outhouse. The whole museum was very interesting.

We retired to the RV for dinner and later took a short stroll down to the Chena River to enjoy the evening sunlight.