“The Golden Heart of Alaska”
Posted on June 24, 2008
Filed Under Call us tourists | Leave a Comment
Posted by Daria
That’s what Fairbanks calls itself. The second-largest city in Alaska, Fairbanks is big and sprawling. It reminded me of Las Cruces, N.M., with a college off at one side, a small downtown, a large mall, and a lot of strip malls and stand-alone businesses. Stan says it’s a town that shows the scars of hard weather.
One must-visit place in Fairbanks is the University of Alaska Museum. It’s part art museum, part history museum, and part outdoors museum, and it does a great job of combining the three. One of the coolest things there is “Blue Babe,” a mummified, prehistoric steppe bison that still has some of its original hide on it. There’s an informative exhibit on the relocation of Japanese-Americans and Aleuts during World War II. The upstairs art gallery has an aurora borealis piece that changes over the course of an hour, and a room of silence, light, and sound that can’t really be explained.
Fairbanks has a collection of old buildings, including log cabins, in Pioneer Park, the former site of the Alaskaland theme park. Many of the log cabins were hauled in from other parts of the city and are now shops. The docked riverboat Nenana features dioramas of small towns that the boat used to visit. Pioneer Park also has a well-known salmon bake, featuring all-you-can-eat salmon, halibut, cod, or prime rib, plus salad and dessert. Since I’m the only one who eats fish, we decided to pass. Instead, we went to the Chena Pump House, a restaurant and saloon built inside an historic pump house. We sat out on the bar deck along the Chena River and had great food (salmon sandwich, elk burger, beef burger, fried zucchini) and beer. The weather was finally nice!
We panned for gold up north near the Felix Pedro Monument, which pays tribute to the Italian man who first discovered gold near Fairbanks. We found a few flakes. Other people nearby were far more serious, with buckets and shovels in hand. Gold panning is very time-consuming and hard on the back. It takes a lot of patience. Your feet get wet. I think it would appeal to people who like to fly-fish.
Fairbanks has a great ice cream stand called Hot Licks. There are two Hot Licks, one on College and one on Cushman. The ice cream is really heavy on butterfat, so it’s really good. Stan and Sierra both had chocolate varieties, while I had one with pineapple and coconut.
I liked mine but theirs were even better, probably because mine had the mild, sweet cream-flavored ice cream as a base, while theirs had more intense flavors from the chocolate.
It was supposedly light for 21 hours when we were in Fairbanks. However, when I woke up at 1:30 a.m. after the sun had allegedly set at 12:45 a.m., it was still light out. So I guess it just doesn’t get dark.
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