Things to do in Fairbanks
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Museum of the North
Museum of the North at the University of Alaska rivals the Anchorage Museum of History & Art as the state's most impressive cultural center. A $42 million expansion added a Alaska Native art gallery and a sound-and-light theatre that features the northern lights. But the most popular exhibit is still Blue Babe, a 36,000-year-old bison found preserved in the permafrost.
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Lemongrass
Ignore the out-of-the-way, strip-mall setting - Fairbanks' best Thai food and most gracious service is found here.
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Fairbanks Ice Museum
Certainly the most bemusing sight in the city's downtown - and by far the best place to chill out - is the Fairbanks Ice Museum . This hour-long experience takes place in the historic, musty-smelling Lacey Street Theater, which you'll likely have largely to yourself. First comes the screening of the film Freeze Frame, which employs dramatic editing to chronicle the World Ice Art Championships, an ice-sculpting contest held in Fairbanks each March.
Then the lights come up to reveal an array of life-sized crystalline carvings ringing the theatre. They're all stereotypical Alaskan scenes - howling huskies and bears wrestling salmon - and some are slightly melted or broken. I…
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Circle District Historical Society Museum
One of the best museums of any small Alaskan town is the Circle District Historical Society Museum in Central. Established in 1984, the main portion of the museum is a large log lodge that houses a miner's cabin, exhibits on early mining equipment and dog-team freight and mail hauling, and the Yukon Press - the first printing press north of Juneau, which produced Interior Alaska's first newspaper.
The most interesting display is the museum's collection of gold nuggets and gold flakes recovered and donated by local miners. This display, more than anything else, will help you understand why they continue to tear away at the hills and streams in an effort to find the preciou…
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University of Alaska Fairbanks
University of Alaska Fairbanks is the original campus of the state's university system and an interesting place to spend an afternoon. Incorporated in 1917 as the Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines, the school began its first year with six students. Today, it has more than 8000, and hundreds of degree and certificate programs.
The beautiful campus is 4 miles west of downtown, on a hilltop from which you can see Mt McKinley on a clear day. An Alaska Range viewpoint on Yukon Dr, near the University of Alaska Museum, provides a turnout and a marker detailing the mountainous horizon.
Guided campus tours are offered at 10:00 weekdays; meet at the museum. The tours …
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Chena Hot Springs Resort
At the end of Chena Hot Springs Rd is the Chena Hot Springs Resort. The springs themselves were discovered by gold miners in 1905, and by 1912 they were the premier place to soak for the happy residents of boom town Fairbanks. They still are. The busiest season for this resort, by far, is winter, and often during midweek in the summer you can score on some impressive 'slow season discounts'.
The Chena springs are at the centre of a 40 sq mile geothermal area and produce a steady stream of water that's so hot, it must be cooled before you can even think about putting a toe in. The most popular activity is hot-tub soaking, done both outdoors and indoors. Other activities in…
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Fairbanks Community Museum
Fairbanks Community Museum , though not thrilling, merits a visit on a rainy day. This homespun place traces the city's history mainly through old photos and newspaper clippings.
More interestingly, the museum is also home to the Yukon Quest Cache, with a gift shop and displays devoted to the city's seminal dog-sled race. Like a handful of other Alaskan towns, Fairbanks bills itself as the dog mushing capital of the world. The Yukon Quest, taking place each February, covers 1023 miles between here and Whitehorse along many of the early trails used by trappers, miners and the postal service. Though less famous than the Iditarod , mushers will attest that the Quest is tough…
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Manley Hot Springs Town
The town of Manley Hot Springs may be one of the loveliest discoveries you'll make in Alaska. At the end of a long, lonely road, here's a gem of a town, full of friendly folks, well-kept log homes and luxuriant gardens. Located between Hot Springs Slough and the Tanana River, the community was first homesteaded in 1902 by JF Karshner, just as the US Army Signal Corps arrived to put in a telegraph station.
A few years later, as the place boomed with miners from the nearby Eureka and Tofty districts, Frank Manley arrived and built a four-story hotel. Most of the miners are gone now, but Manley's name - and the spirit of an earlier era - remains. In modern times the town has…
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Northern Lights
For many visitors, Fairbanks' primary pulling power lies in a natural phenomenon: the Aurora Borealis, better known as the Northern Lights. As solar winds flow across the earth's upper atmosphere, they hit gas molecules which light up, much like the high-vacuum electrical discharge of a neon sign.
What you end up with is a solar-powered light show of waving, diaphanous light streaming across the night sky. In the dead of winter, the aurora often fills the sky for hours. Other nights, 'the event', as many call it, lasts less than 10 minutes.
This polar phenomenon has been seen as far south as Mexico, but Fairbanks is the undisputed aurora capital. The best viewing is from …
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Angel Rocks Hiking Trail
Angel Rocks Hiking Trail is a 3.5-mile loop trail that leads to Angel Rocks: large granite outcroppings near the north boundary of Chena River State Recreation Area. It's a moderate day's hike; the elevation gain is 900ft and the rocks are less than 2 miles from the road.
The trail is also the first leg of the Angel Rocks-Chena Hot Springs Traverse, a more difficult 8.3-mile trek that ends at the Chena Hot Springs Resort, at the end of Chena Hot Springs Rd. Roughly halfway along the traverse is a free-use shelter. The posted trailhead for Angel Rocks is just south of a rest area at Mile 49 of the Chena Hot Springs Rd. The lower trailhead for the Chena Dome Trail is practi…
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Creamer's Field Migratory Waterfowl Refuge
A handful of trails, each less than 2 miles round-trip, wind through the farmlands and forests of Creamer's Field Migratory Waterfowl Refuge, an old dairy farm that's become a birders' paradise. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game seeds the area with bird-luring plants, attracting more than 100 species annually, including Sandhill cranes. The Farmhouse Visitor Center, adjacent to the Fish and Game office and reached by the MACS Red Line, has trail guides, bug spray and a list of recent sightings.
Volunteers lead one-hour nature walks at 19:00 Monday through Friday and 09:00 Wednesday.
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Georgeson Botanical Garden
Georgeson Botanical Garden is a kaleidoscope of flowers, herbs, fruits and gigantic vegetables, and the Large Animal Research Station.
On the station grounds is the 5-acre Georgeson Botanical Garden, a perfect picnicking spot that's a riot of wildflowers, herbs, fruits and gigantic vegetables. You can look around independently anytime during opening hours, and guided tours are offered on Fridays at 14:00.
To reach the station take Tanana Loop west from the lower campus, bear left at the fork onto W Tanana Dr and continue for a mile.
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Malamute Saloon
Rowdy saloons that are throwbacks from the mining days are this area's specialty. The Malamute Saloon, 7mi west of Fairbanks in Ester, offers honky-tonk music, skits, vaudeville and a ritual reading of Robert Service poetry. The bar is a classic, and the show is perhaps one of the best locally produced acts in Alaska. They'll have you laughing in the sawdust by the end of the evening.
There's free bus transportation from Fairbanks that stops at major hotels, including the Bridgewater. Or you can make it an evening by booking a room or a tent site at Ester Gold Camp.
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Pump House Restaurant
Located 2 miles from downtown, this is the best place to turn dinner into an evening, or to enjoy a great Sunday brunch. A pump house during the gold-mining era, the building is now a national historic site. The atmosphere is classic gold rush; inside and out there are artifacts and relics from the city's mining era. Steak, seafood and wild game dominate the menu, and you can also enjoy a drink on the outdoor deck while watching the boat traffic on the Chena. The MACS Blue Line goes by here.
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Granite Tors Hiking Trail
The 15-mile Granite Tors Hiking Trail loop provides access into an alpine area with unusual tors: isolated pinnacles of granite rising out of the tundra. The first set is 6 miles from the trailhead but the best group lies 2 miles further along the trail. The entire trail is a five- to eight-hour trek gaining 2700ft in elevation, with a free-use shelter midway. The trailhead is in the Tors Trail State Campground, at Mile 39 of the Chena Hot Springs Rd.
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Eagle Summit Trail
Eagle Summit, 3624ft in elevation, has a parking area for the second trailhead of the Pinnell Mountain Trail. A climb of less than a mile leads to the mountaintop, the highest point along the Steese Hwy and a place where the midnight sun can be observed skimming the horizon around the summer solstice. On a clear day, summiting here can feel like ascending to heaven. The peak is also near a caribou migration route.
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Manley Hot Springs
Privately owned by famously hospitable Chuck and Gladys Dart, bathing happens within a huge, thermal-heated greenhouse that's a veritable Babylonian garden of grapes, Asian pears and hibiscus flowers. Deep in this jungle are three spring-fed concrete tubs, each burbling at different temperatures. Pay your money, hose yourself down, pluck some fruit and soak away in this deliriously un-Alaskan setting.
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Bike & Canoe Hire, 7 Bridges Boats & Bikes
Bike & Canoe Hire, 7 Bridges Boats & Bikes, at the 7 Gables Inn & Suites, rents road bikes and mountain bikes for a day. They also provide canoes and a shuttle service.
From 7 Bridges Boats & Bikes you can drop a canoe in the Chena River, head downstream and into the quiet Noyes Slough and complete the loop by paddling east back into the river, a 13-mile round-trip journey.
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Gold Dredge No 8
Off the old Steese Hwy at Mile 10 Goldstream Rd, this five-deck, 250ft dredge was built in 1928, operated until 1959, and was named a national historic site in 1984. Today perhaps Alaska's most visited dredge, No 8 is still making money. There are on-the-hour one-hour tours from 09:30 to 15:30 daily; for an additional fee you can also indulge in gold panning and the all-you-can-eat Miner's Lunch.
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Gold Dredge No 8 tours
Off the old Steese Hwy at Mile 10 Goldstream Rd, this five-deck, 250ft dredge was built in 1928, operated until 1959, and was named a national historic site in 1984. Today perhaps Alaska's most visited dredge, No 8 is still making money. There are on-the-hour one-hour tours from 09:30 to 15:30 daily; for an additional fee you can also indulge in gold panning and the all-you-can-eat Miner's Lunch.
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Larry's Flying Service
The Arctic Circle may be an imaginary line, but it's become one of Fairbanks' biggest draws, with small air-charter companies doing booming business flying travelers on sightseeing excursions across it. Larry's Flying Service offers a 1¾-hour air-only tour, or a three-hour trip with an hour-long ground tour of Fort Yukon, just north of the circle.
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Hutlinana Creek
Hutlinana Creek is reached at Mile 129, and a quarter mile east of the bridge is an 8-mile creekside trail to Hutlinana Warm Springs, an undeveloped thermal area with a 3ft-deep pool. The springs are visited mainly in winter; in summer, the buggy bushwhack seems uninviting. From the bridge it's another 23 miles southwest to Manley Hot Springs.
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Hutlinana Warm Springs
Hutlinana Creek is reached at Mile 129, and a quarter mile east of the bridge is an 8-mile creekside trail to Hutlinana Warm Springs, an undeveloped thermal area with a 3ft-deep pool. The springs are visited mainly in winter; in summer, the buggy bushwhack seems uninviting. From the bridge it's another 23 miles southwest to Manley Hot Springs.
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Wood Center
A good place to start exploring the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus is Wood Center, where the information desk provides the UAF Campus Map & Visitors' Guide and the latest scoop on university events. This student center and general meeting place also holds a cafeteria, espresso stand, pizza parlor, pub and an outdoor patio.
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Livengood
Livengood, 2 miles east of the highway at Mile 71, has no services and is little more than a scattering of log shanties. Here, the Elliott Hwy swings west and in 2 miles, at the junction of the Dalton Hwy, pavement ends and the road becomes a rutted, rocky lane. Traffic evaporates and until Manley Hot Springs you may not see another vehicle.
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