Date: 27 June 2001 (Wednesday)

Start:

End: River’s Edge RV Park, Fairbanks AK (0 miles)

The temperature was 54f when we got up, under cloudy skies. It had rained in the night, not much. It stayed cloudy all day, only reached 60f, and felt cooler with the breeze.

We started by going back to Creamer’s field – the wildlife (mainly bird) preserve. We hiked the boreal forest trail. The mosquitoes in there were fierce. They were big and mean and there were thousands of them. We put on a DEET-based repellant that drove most of the away.

We didn’t see much, only four sand-hill cranes, since most of the birds have migrated elsewhere.

So we headed for Alaskaland. This is sort of a free open museum. They have all sorts of things in it. The railroad car used by President Harding when he drove the golden spike completing the Alaska Railroad is here. The old paddlewheel steamboat "Nenana" is here (on land) and can be toured. Many of the old log buildings of old-time Fairbanks have been moved out here and form a historic area; they are in use as gift shops, snack bars, and so forth. There’s a little railroad around the place. There’s an old-time aircraft museum in a small building. There is a large building that hosts musical review productions. There is a small building that has a bunch of old-time Alaskana in it. We couldn’t do it all, maybe we can finish it tomorrow. We did use it to pick up some gifts, mainly books on Alaska in a great little bookstore where the owner knows most of the authors.

We went downtown and to lunch in Gambardella’s, the Italian place in town. Lunch was huge (spaghetti and italian sausage for me, ten-layer lasagna for Dolores) and quite good.

We walked around the gift shops downtown and then went out to the shops at the Riverboat Discovery place that we couldn’t really see yesterday. We bought a few small items there.

Then we went on a ride north of town, resuming the driving tour we started two days ago. We went to a viewpoint that is supposed to furnish an excellent view of Fairbanks and the Tanana valley; it wasn’t all that good in the reduced visibility and gloom, but we got the idea.

The next stop was the Alaska pipeline viewing point. That was interesting – they chose a point where the pipeline goes underground. This illustrates that the pipeline is below ground unless there is permafrost underground. They ran short stretches underground even in permafrost if an animal crossing was needed – they feared the animals wouldn’t go underneath it. The mountings required in permafrost are interesting – you don’t want to melt the permafrost and cause the mounting pilings to shift, so they have many fins and the heat passes to the atmosphere.

The oil passes down the pipeline at 3.4 mph. The peak rate was 1.15 billion barrels in one day. As the North Coast field is depleted, the amount being pumped is decreasing.

After leaving the viewing point, we went north on the Steese highway toward Circle. We saw a monument to Felix Pedro, the Italian immigrant who discovered gold in the Tanana valley, at the point where he discovered it. More gold by far was taken out of the goldfields around Fairbanks than ever came out of the Yukon; there is still one operating gold mine north of town.

We traveled further out the highway to see an old gold camp. But we stopped suddenly when a moose came up out of the brush on one side of the road, jogged across the road, and disappeared into the brush on the other side. This male moose had a small set of antlers in velvet and was just plain BIG. We’re very glad he came out then, rather than later, so we could stop in time.

We looked briefly at the gold camp (a set of corrugated metal covered buildings that housed up to 200 miners during hydraulic operations in the valley), but left without stopping due to the light rain and mist.

Home sounded good so we came back to the little house in the large campground by the Chena about 7:00 and relaxed the rest of the evening.