DAY 283 Wednesday 18th JUNE 2008

Fairbanks, Alaska (Miles to Date: 29000

For our second night in Fairbanks Mark had arranged for us to stay at the Aurora Express Bed & Breakfast (www.fairbanksalaskabedandbreakfast.com/trains.html). The accommodation here is made up of old train carriages from the Alaskan Railway system. Four blue and yellow carriages were owned by the National Park Service but they didn’t have the funds to do anything with them. Two were sent to a transportation museum and two were bought by Mike and Sue Wilson of Fairbanks, who got a real bargain when they bought the two old style Alaska Railroad cars for only $1 each - if you don't count the transportation bill. It cost them more than $20,000 to move the two railroad cars to Fairbanks, where they already owned a caboose. Mike and Sue have carefully restored the carriages, a number of which have been themed and named to suit their characters; such as the “Immaculate Conception” and the “Bordello”. Our carriage, the “National Emblem”, a 1956 Pullman private sleeper car was significantly more sedate. We had possession of the whole 85 feet of carriage, including 4 private sleeping compartments. The original features of the Pullman car had been kept pretty much intact, which we thought was more interesting than sleeping in a bordello!!! The other fantastic thing about the Aurora Express B&B is the breakfasts which are served up canteen style at 8:00am on the dot in the dedicated dining car. The food was hot and very, very tasty.

Today our first port of call was the impressive looking Museum of the North, based at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. The museum is housed in a wonderfully modern edifice on a hill overlooking the City of Fairbanks. The main exhibition area is the Gallery of Alaska, which is divided into five regional galleries representing the major ecological regions of Alaska. Each gallery highlights the distinct natural and cultural history of these regions. The displays gave a wonderful insight in to the history of the Alaskan territory – both good and bad (including a moving tale of the forced evacuation and internment of Aleut Americans during World War II). In addition to the human stories of Alaska there were exhibits covering the ecology of this vast and diverse State. One of our favourite galleries contained many pieces of Native Alaskan art, both historical and present as well as exhibits of art work from local artists, including a highly ornate outhouse. Outhouses are still common place in the Alaska as the frigid temperatures and the hard, permafrost ground make plumbing a challenge. In fact outhouses are revered and often decorated, there is even a book celebrating the Alaskan outhouse and an annual outhouse race held through the streets of Anchorage. Something about the cold temperatures and constant winter darkness does affect the mind!!

After a morning of cultural overload we decided that we needed to follow this with a simpler form of entertainment. Our next stop was only a short drive away – the aptly named Large Animal Research Station. The main reason for coming here was to see muskoxen. These delightful creatures are more closely related to sheep and goats than to oxen, but are in their own genus, Ovibos. The muskox we found to be a lot smaller than we had expected, even with the thick coats that protect them from the harsh winter weather. Muskox wool, or qiviut (an Inuit word), is highly prized for its softness, length, and insulative value. The Alaskan muskox story is a little-known conservation success, with the muskox reclaiming some of the ranges it inhabited over a century ago. Muskoxen disappeared from their last remaining strongholds in northern Alaska during the late 1800's. Hunting by humans contributed to their decline. In 1930, the U.S. Congress provided funds to ship 34 muskoxen from Greenland to Alaska. From the first herd established on Nunivak Island, 71 animals were transplanted to the Seward Peninsula, during 1970 and 1981. So far, people have not hunted the reintroduced muskoxen, allowing them to increase at a rate of 15-20% annually. In April of 1992 the Alaska Department of Fish & Game, Bureau of Land Management, and National Park Service jointly conducted an aerial survey and found 706 muskox on the Seward Peninsula. Our visit coincided with the end of the breeding season and we were very lucky to see some of the calves born in the spring

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As well as muskox the Research Station also studies caribou. These large, sub-arctic dwelling deer are still numerous in the interior and north of Alaska. One of the great sights of the animal kingdom is the vast migration herds, numbering 150,000 to 200,000 caribou, that follow a 400 mile route along Alaska’s Porcupine river every year from their winter feeding grounds in the south to the north Alaskan coastal plain where they calve. Along the migration route the caribou pass through the tundra of the Alaskan interior, where we heard they are molested by swarms of bugs, including mosquitoes and warble flies. The mosquitoes are simply after their blood, but the numbers of these insects are so high the poor caribou can loose pints of blood in a single day. More horrific are the warble flies, which lay their eggs in the skin of the caribou. The larvae hatch and eat their way out of the skin before the metamorphosis process into adulthood, causing a great amount of irritation to the animal. In some case the warble flies lay their eggs inside the nasal cavity – this can cause a great deal of distress (not surprisingly) to the caribou.

The day continues to go down hill culturally speaking as we round it off with a trip to the town of North Pole, Alaska, where the locals claim the “Spirit of Christmas lives year around”. If you hadn’t read this before visiting then the candy cane shaped lamp posts would have probably given the game away. The town itself is pretty much non-descript but our reason for the visit was to visit Santa Claus’ House. This is the place where you can get letters posted from Santa Claus, post-marked North Pole – cool eh! Sadly Santa Claus’ House is a store rather than a house (but there are reindeer parked out back) but sure enough Santa and Mrs Claus are faithfully on duty for photo-opportunities and to make mobile phone calls back to little Johnny down in Tampa Bay, Florida. After some coercion we did manage to get a reluctant Jack and Emily to pose with Santa whilst we did a video message for Laura back in England. Luckily as we’re travelling light we did not have the opportunity to spend money on seasonal tchatchke.

DAY 282 Tuesday 17th JUNE 2008

Fairbanks, Alaska (Miles to Date: 28920)

Before setting off on the next stage of our tour we decided to pay one more visitor to the Visitors Centre in Denali NP. We wanted to attend a talk on the geology and rock structures of Denali, given by one of the volunteers staying in the park campground. It turns out that parts of Alaska were once connected to other parts of the United States as far away as the Dakotas. There are some who think that one day California will break off and collide with Alaska –now that will have a big impact on that Californian real estate!!. Our minds geologically saturated we depart a damp and dreary Denali and continue our journey north towards Fairbanks. As we leave the high peaks of the Alaska range and move deeper into the Interior the mountains are replaced by rolling hills. Fairbanks is the largest city in Alaska’s interior and the 2nd largest in the State after Anchorage, and was originally founded in 1901 as a trading centre. In 1902 gold was discovered in the area which resulted in an explosion in the population. Today Fairbanks has evolved from a gold rush town into a modern city – albeit somewhat sleepy.

Our first night in Fairbanks was spent in the Townsite Gardens B & B close to downtown. The owner Kazumi and her daughter, who Emily befriended, made us most welcome and the family suite was very comfortable.

Today we decided to explore Fairbanks a bit more. Our first stop of the day was the Fairbanks Ice Museum, which is somewhat homespun but great fun. We are treated to a demonstration of ice carving using a combination of hand and electrical tools. After an amazingly short time the artist produces an ice fish statue. This museum used to be a cinema and they have retained the seating, but around the sides and the front of the theatre they have built glass panelled rooms. In these rooms, which are refrigerated, are the most fantastic ice sculptures of walruses, bears, Inuit Eskimos, musical instruments and many other creations. Going into these rooms was marvellous but rather chilly. The finale of our visit is a film about the World Ice Art Championships (http://www.icealaska.com/index.html) which take place in Fairbanks every March. Teams of carvers from all around the world brave the cold March weather and using local ice hewn from frozen lakes (Fairbanks apparently has the best quality ice in the world) to create wonderful creations, some reaching two storeys high.

After experiencing the Ice Museum we headed north out of Fairbanks towards the artic circle to the El Dorado Gold Mine. We hop aboard a narrow-gauge train to start our two-hour tour of the Gold Mine to learn all about how 100,000 gold rushers fought the permafrost in their quest to get rich.

The tour begins as you board the train and travel to a historic, working gold mine that looks as it would have when gold fever first swept across America. Our conductor Earl Hughes plays songs from days gone by and spins yarns about early Alaska as we travel below ground to a permafrost tunnel and meet a gold miner. Further on we pass by several exhibits of prospector’s cabins and mining equipment.

Our final stop is a working gold camp where the real fun begins. We meet local miners Dexter and Yukon Yonda have been operating small mines for more than 25 years, who teach us all about modern mining techniques. We then get to try our hand at gold panning, with success guaranteed. It is a short walk to the gift shop where we get our samples weighed. We decided to collect together our hard worked for gold dust and put into a necklace charm to give the Jack and Emily’s grandmother as a gift. The best thing about the end of this tour is the complimentary coffee and fresh-baked cookies.

Our day is not yet done and we head back to Fairbanks where we stopped at Pioneer Park. Here a number of historic buildings have been relocated from all around Fairbanks and the surrounds, and set out in a series of quaint streets which are now set aside as shops. There is even a paddle steamer which is a dry docked museum. Our main reason for stopping here was to visit an attraction called 40 Below. The significance of 40 below (which is where the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales converge) is that this is the chilly temperature reached in central Alaska in the winter time. The exhibit is quite modest basically a shack with a large freezer unit at the rear. They provided us with warm parka jackets and gloves, a jug of hot water and set us off into the freezer. The first thing we do is throw the hot water into the air where it explosively evaporates is a fraction of a second, saving us from a scalding. The thermometer in the room reads -40 degrees, but there is heat exchanger fan blowing cold air in so with the wind chill it is probably much colder. The room is sparsely decorated with only a large thrown like chair and table carved out of ice, in which is a banana some nails and a block of wood. The banana is frozen, so much so you can take it and use it to knock nails into the wood. Even with the warm clothes provided it is too cold to hang around so we take some pictures and head out into the balmy 60 degree weather outside. At $5 per person to get in it is a little pricey but well worth it to get a feel of the Alaskan interior’s winter.