Day 8 Gold in Fairbanks

Fur coat with sunshine ruff

We started the day on the paddlewheeler Discovery traveling down the Chena River.  They arrange demonstrations along the way so you get to see a float plane take off and land and a dog mushing demonstration at Susan Butcher’s place.  Dog mushing is definitely the “un-official” sport of Alaska and Susan Butcher won the Iditarod four times in a five year span in the late 80’s.  She was so popular that they have Susan Butcher Day in Alaska and they sell t-shirts that read “Alaska: Where men are men and women win the Iditarod!” 


We stopped at a Chena Indian Village along the river where they have a Athabascan Fish Camp replica set up and saw how they caught the salmon in a fish wheel and how they smoked it to preserve it.  The Athabascan are a tribe up here in central Alaska.  They also gave talks about how the Indians (doesn’t seem to be a bad word up here) made clothing from hides and built their log cabins with sod roofs.  I know it all sounds a bit contrived, but they have some Indian girls who are attending University of Alaska at Fairbanks give the talks and they made it interesting and fun.

Jeanne's Gold Strike!

After that we went to Gold Dredge #8 for a tour of how they used to dredge for gold  in Fairbanks.  It is a bit too complicated to describe in the blog, but they processed tons of rocks just to get tiny gold flakes that are 20 to 30 feet under a permafrost layer.  This eventually became unprofitable and they closed the dredge in 1959.  However luckily for us, you can do some panning for gold at the end of the tour and both Jeanne and I found gold.  She found $10 worth and I found $20 (not that there was a competition, just saying).


After a dinner of caribou steak sandwiches, we drove around some.  Fairbanks is technically in a desert and it gets less rain than Phoenix, but it has rained some both days we were here so I don’t know about that.  It is the northern-most point on our trip and gets some of the most extreme weather – high of 90 in the summer and low of -50 in the winter is typical.  After driving to the North Pole (actually south from here) to see Santa’s Workshop, we drove though downtown Fairbanks (four square blocks) and up to the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus, which has a good view of the Alaska range and Denali more than 100 miles in the distance.  Fairbanks is also a very good spot to view the northern lights but it is too bright in the summer.  Sundown today was 11:47 pm but it remains reasonably light through the night until sunrise at 4:08 am.