Farewell to Fairbanks and some final thoughts

As we sit in the adorably tiny Fairbanks Airport awaiting our flight home (I think there are 6 total gates), I'm fondly reminiscing about the past two weeks we've traveled through the interior. From Fairbanks, through McCarthy/Kennecott, Glacier View to Seward, Denali, and back to Fairbanks, it is hard for me to imagine a better trip. We've been incredibly lucky with the weather and packed twice as many clothes as we needed, even though we limited ourselves to one duffle bag and backpack each. It was still too much and almost anything cotton was virtually useless.

Chris and I have been trying desperately to avoid the cheesy tourist traps that seem hard to avoid in Fairbanks. We managed to find better activities with more substance and authenticity than the downtown ice museum and the sternwheeler riverboat with the sled dog and bush plane "demonstrations." Our visit with musher Mary Shields and our two flights on the bush plane over Wrangell made the riverboat, in particular, laughably inadequate. I guess we are travel snobs.  But we avoided those two popular places like the plague.
I thought we would have to succumb to the trap when we arrived at the Gold Dredge 8 historic site attraction. Pulling up and seeing 2 tour buses unloading did not make me happy. When we left, there were 8 buses!

We were pleasantly surprised at the professionally-run tour, including the veteran high school history teacher who led us through.  George explained the Transatlantic Pipe System (TAPS) has been bringing oil from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez since the summer of 1977, and that Valdez is the northernmost port in the world.
He then boarded a train with us and we listened to an engaging talk for about 20 minutes while we rode through the property, stopping a couple of times for demonstrations of the dredging steps in order to extract gold. We had a good time gold panning at the end of the line, and our combined flakes weighed in at $70 worth. We then reboarded with George for a final 20 minutes of his delightful lecture.

The 3 of us found a great thai lunch place and found ourselves back on the UA campus. I'm so impressed by the displays they have put together in the Geophysical Institute and the International Arctic Research Center. The school also hosts the largest land-based rocket range in the world, and they test various payloads and do experiments here first before NASA and others replicate flights on a larger scale.

A friendly UA employee reminded us of the Morris Cultural Center, and we were fortunate to arrive in time for a group of mainly Athabaskan high school students who did traditional dances and sang from the plethora of dialects that make up the region in an hour-long cultural show. Jackson and I were part of the audience members who were asked to participate with them in the broom dance. The center itself houses quite beautiful interactive exhibits as well, and we spent the rest of our afternoon there.

Sadly, we succumbed to a Denali Mac at McDonald's...just as greasy as the Big Mac at home...and we bid goodbye to an unforgettable trip to Alaska.  We look forward to returning soon.