Fairbanks – July 3rd

Saturday morning, June 30^th, we went to Fairbank’s Pioneer Park. It’s a rustic theme park filled with museums, galleries, a gold rush town and a dry docked sternwheeler. They also have an area for RVs to dry camp, free WIFI and we decided to move here on Sunday. After a short walk around we realized that we needed more than a morning to visit this park so we left for our Riverboat tour.

Riverboat Discovery is advertised as the #1 rated tour in North America and we really enjoyed all 3 ½ hours of it. The boat is spacious and clean and the tour starts with a demonstration of a float plane taking off and landing on the river next to the sternwheeler. Flying is a very popular mode of travel here in Alaska since there aren’t that many roads. As we traveled down the river we saw planes docked in front of homes and even in driveways! Some of the homes belong to the very wealthy and are huge and others are old dumps. This also is typical of Alaska. When I lived in Anchorage I couldn’t believe that the zoning would allow a mixture of residential and business next to each other. There probably wasn’t any zoning back then!

Our first stop was at the home and kennels of Susan Butcher, the Iditarod champion. Even though she passed away two years ago from Leukemia, her husband and kids are still active with the sled dogs. We saw a litter of puppies, all of the adult dogs, and a demonstration of a team of dogs pulling an ATV around a small lake. Their speed is amazing! The dogs did a lot of jumping around and barking but once they were in the harness they were all business and just wanted to go. After they returned they were unhooked and they all ran to the river to cool off.

The trip continued down the Chena River until it met the Tanana River. The junction of the rivers is called “Wedding of the rivers” because you can actually see the blending of the rivers. The Tanana River is white/gray in color because it’s fed by glaciers and contains lot of ground up rock. The Chena’s waters are brown so when the two types of water met you can see the two waters mixing together. Both the rivers are low right now but as the warm days continue they are expected to rise.

The Tanana is filled with sand bars so we were given another demonstration of a small plane landing and taking off of one of the sand bars. Just another demonstration of how versatile theses planes are. It looked like fun. In winter the pilots attach skis and retract the wheels so they can land on snow or glaciers.

Our final stop was at an Athabascan Indian village where we were shown different techniques on how they fillet salmon for various uses. We also saw how native parkas are made and decorated. Each type of fur in the parka is there for a specific reason. The parkas made by Dixie, an Athabascan seamstress, are valued at more than $18,000 and she even has one in the Smithsonian. I had a chance to talk to her and she gave me the name of a local quilt shop that I should visit, which we did on Sunday.

We moved over to Pioneer Park on Sunday, July 1^st and will probably be here until the 4^th. Yesterday, we took Monty in for repairs to the bathroom sink and toilet. There were pieces of plastic in the pipes that became lodged in the valves and stopped the flow of water. The repair folks think the plastic had been in the system since the trailer was made. Everything is working again.

We’ll be heading for Denali soon.