Fairbanks

By morning a lot of the smoke had disappeared. Since it is Sunday, we decided to read aloud a lesson from the Teachings of the Presidents and play a CD of music from an evensong performance. Then we put in the CD Linda bought yesterday and listened to a rousing chorus of "Welcome to the Last Frontier" as we drove through rolling taiga forest. Diane was driving and fortunately saw the moose in time to brake sharply as she came out of the woods on the left and crossed right in front of our bumper. She was a very large, dark brown cow, and without even glancing at us she loped across the road and into the woods on the other side. At that moment the second song on the CD began, a lively little children's song that began: It's a moose! It's a moose! And it was, indeed, a moose. A little further we encountered another cow moose and calf grazing alongside the road. By the time we turned around to go back for a better look, the pair had disappeared, but we had at last seen some meese.

There is some disagreement between Delta Junction and Fairbanks over where the terminus of the Alaska Hwy is, but we noticed that the mileage markers for the distance from Dawson Creek ended at Delta Junction, so I guess that is the official terminus. But Fairbanks still has a marker celebrating the end.



We followed the Tanana (rhymes with Panama) River into Fairbanks. It is very muddy with glacial "flour" and is very wide. This picture doesn't do it justice, but you can see that it has several channels. Many of the rivers up here have characteristic braided channels. Anyway, we finally reached Fairbanks, which is a largish town with no redeeming characteristics that we have discovered yet. We got in quite early, checked in, got some lunch and went for a ride on the sternwheeler "Discovery III." It is a four-decked tourist boat that took us down the Chena River to it's confluence with the Tanana.


From the Discovery III we saw this bush pilot take off from the river. We hove to near a breeder of sled dogs and had a little pre-arranged lesson in breeding and racing sled dogs, then went on to Chena Village, which was a reconstruction of early Athabascan camps and dwellings. A lovely young Eskimo girl was our guide and talked about how they had lived by fishing, hunting, and trapping before the arrival of Europeans, and how that arrival changed their lifestyles. Here she is modelling a woman's parka. Beautiful workmanship.


I heard some criticism of this blog for posting pictures of Linda, but none of Diane. So here is Diane posing at Chena Village with a stuffed moose. Diane is the one in the foreground.

Tomorrow we start up the Dalton Highway, known as the Haul Road. We got Linda a fishing license so she can try out a lake just north of Atigun Pass in the Brooks Range. We were told by a very friendly local that if you throw your lure into the lake you will have at least two fish fighting over it. We'll let you know if this is true.