An ooey, gooey cinnamon bun - what a marvelous way to start the day in Healey, outside of Alaska's Denali National Park and Preserve, before Steven and I drove two hours north to Fairbanks!
There were no tremendous mountain vistas to behold - just pretty birch forests that reminded me of the street I had grown up on in Ottawa.
The closer we got to Fairbanks, however, the trees were weirdly stunted for some reason.
A sign on the pullout on Alaska State Highway Route 3 had been designated the George Parks Highway in honor of the Denver native who had moved to Alaska after graduating from the Colorado School of Mines. After working as a mining engineer, he eventually rose to lead the U.S. Land Office in Juneau and was later appointed as the state's two-time territorial governor. He died in Juneau in 1984 at the age of 100.
Fairbanks, the only 'city' in the state's interior and the largest settlement for hundreds of miles, sits at the nexus of the region's major highways and epic routes - south, where we had come from, to Denali, north to the Arctic, and east to Canada. The city was founded in 1901 when a trading post merchant, ET Barnette, was stranded on the shallow Chena River at what is now the corner of 1st Ave and Cushman Ave. while hauling supplies to the Tanacross goldfields.
The following year, one of his first customers, Italian prospector Felix Pedro, struck gold 12 miles south. A large boomtown sprang into life, attracting more than 18,000 people who helped create the Fairbanks Mining District by 1908. While gold rushes largely drained populations in other communities, Fairbanks's population outlasted those of any other community in the state.
World War II and the construction of military bases, along with the Alcan Highway, a historic 1,387-mile route connecting Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to Delta Junction, Alaska, were responsible for the city's next boom. But nothing affected Fairbanks more than the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which reached its peak from 1973 to 1977. The city almost burst at its seams, as it was the main gateway to the North Slope.
However, the aftermath of pipeline construction was just as extreme, resulting in a shrinking population and unemployment ballooning to almost 25%. Fortunately, the discovery of another gold vein in the late 1990s, just north of Fairbanks at the Fort Knox Gold Mine, Alaska's largest, sparked a rebound, with more than 400 workers hired, who helped produce 349,729 ounces of gold in 2010.
Our first stop in Fairbanks was the University of Alaska Museum of the North, after hearing about it the day before at the Magic Bus display in Healey. The building's design was inspired by igloos and the aurora borealis, as Fairbanks is ground zero for viewing it. We read that the building was unlike any other in the state, as its visionaries wanted to express, "Who we are and what we do. We are the keepers of and interpreters of Alaska's natural, cultural, and art history, and we wanted to create architectural art." The compositions of four abstract forms reflected the lines and shapes found along Alaska's coastlines. The horizontal lines represented plate tectonic forces that shaped vast regions of Alaska's landscape.
Inside, we were immediately greeted by a 42-ft.-long skeleton of a Bowhead Whale, which weighed 2,400 pounds.
The museum's archives hold in excess of a staggering 1.4 million specimens and artifacts representing millions of years of biological diversity and more than 10,000 years of cultural traditions in the North. Researchers come from all over the world to study the collections.
This polished slab of petrified wood was cut from a tree trunk collected at a stone quarry near Fairbanks. Dating to the Eocene period, approximately 55 million years ago, the tree grew during a particularly warm time in Alaska's history.
Totem poles originated among Indigenous people in northern Canada and Alaska's Pacific coast. Their highest development was reached after contact with Europeans. The poles were carved to display clan crests, hold the cremated remains of loved ones, memorialize a dead household leader, or commemorate a special occasion. Symbols on the poles were associated with particular social groups, like clans or households.
A pole's raising was often associated with a potlatch, which usually included financial and ceremonial obligations from those who sponsored it. Poles were initially allowed to decay as their raising was an end unto itself. Today, totem poles are carved that are typically protected from deterioration and considered works of art.
As part of the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, Sitka men made replicas of old totem poles that had rotted away at the base.
Chilkat robes were the best-known ceremonial garment used by the Tlingit Indigenous people living along North America's northwest coast. The robes were created from mountain goat wool and twisted strands of inner cedar bark, which were added for strength. The finished woven sections were sewn together with caribou or whale sinew. Regional plants and minerals were the sources of the black, yellow, and blue-green dyes. Men obtained the goat hides, made the loom frames, and also designed the pattern boards to represent the figures used in family crests. It often took a woman three years to weave the wool from three goats into a single robe! This one was created in the mid-1800s.
Never before had we come across a table made from caribou legs, Dall sheep horns, bear fur, and wood! This one was designed in 1905 by Jack Ritter, an English cabinetmaker whose partner hunted wild game for the local market.
Russian exploration of Alaska: Until Peter the Great became Russia's first Emperor in 1721, little was known about the sea or land that might lie to the east of Siberia. That was why he sent Vitus Bering to discover whether Asia and North America were one landmass in 1728, during the first Kamchatka Expedition. He proved they were not connected. During Bering's second Kamchatka Expedition in 1941, he and his lieutenant were credited with discovering Alaska. They explored the Aleutian Islands and sighted the mainland. The expedition's biologist, Georg Steller, reported that the new land's islands teemed with arctic foxes and other fur-bearing animals, and that the sea was rich with sea otters and seals.
The reports prompted independent Siberian fur traders and other adventurers to outfit ships in Kamchatka, a Russian seaport, for furtrading in the Aleutians. By 1794, several outposts and a Russian colony were established in Alaska.
The Russian Orthodox Church: Christianity, in the form of the Russian Orthodox Church, was introduced to the Indigenous Aleuts and Kodiak people by Russian laymen. Church missionaries were persuaded by the founder of the Russian American Company to travel throughout the area under the company's trading influence to establish churches and schools. Some became the centers of villages that still exist, as we had seen days earlier in Soldotna in the Kenai Peninsula. The missionaries were able to stop the horrendous abuse inflicted on the Aleut people by independent fur traders.
I hadn't realized that the Russian Orthodox Church continued to support and staff many schools even after the United States purchased Alaska in 1867. In 1941, the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church of North America was incorporated as an American institution, with Alaska being one of ten dioceses. When we visited the museum in mid-2023, there were 94 Russian Orthodox churches in Alaska with approximately 20,000 members.
This attractive Russian Orthodox Cope, a bishop's vestment worn over other religious garments, was made in a Siberian monastery circa 1800 from silk, cotton, gold, and silver thread.
The paper Russian primer or school book about a simplified history of the Russian Orthodox Church was printed in St. Petersburg in 1893, but it was written in the Aleut language. The church priests used primers to provide religious instruction to the Kodiak islanders.
On June 7, 1942, Japanese forces invaded Attu, one of the Aleutian Islands, and captured 42 Aleuts and 2 others as prisoners. The Japanese military proclaimed that the villagers were under the authority of the Japanese government. Three months later, 41 Aleuts left Attu bound for Japan. There, they worked in clay mines and were given little food, which made them all ill from beriberi and tuberculosis. Japanese troops occupied Attu during the winter of 1942-43. When American troops invaded Attu in May 1943 and retook the island, 549 Americans and 2,300 Japanese died in the battle. Before coming to the museum, I had had no idea that any part of American territory was under enemy control during the war, nor that Americans had been captured on US land and moved to an enemy land.
The photo showed a Prisoner-of-War House in Hokkaido in 1945, the second residence for the Aleuts after arriving in Japan.
As we'd learned the previous day, in September of 2020, the UA Museum of the North became the official repository of Bus 142, aka the Magic Bus, aka the Stampede Bus, aka the Into the Wild Bus. With the move, it was on the ancestral lands of the Dena people of the Lower Tanana River.
For almost 60 years, Bus 142 occupied a spot in the foothills of the Alaska Range, about 20 miles along the Stampede Trail. Those lands had been under the care of the Dene people of interior Alaska for thousands of years. More recently, the area had been used for seasonal subsistence activities by the Dena'ina, Western Ahtna, Lower Tanana, Koyukon, and Upper Kuskokwim peoples.
The bus was removed by the Alaska Army National Guard. After seeing the replica in Healey, we'd hoped to see the original as well as some of the museum's other greatest treasures, including Blue Babe, the mummified 36,000-year-old steppe bison, and the largest collections of gold nuggets on public exhibit. However, we struck out on all accounts, unfortunately.
Upstairs, we had another commanding view of the bowhead whale, which was harvested on September 26, 1963, during the fall subsistence whale hunt in the western Beaufort Sea. After it was towed to the beach near Utqiagvik, the northernmost community in the United States, the skull and bones were cleaned before the specimen was shipped to the museum in 1965. The skull had to be transported by the Alaska Air National Guard in 1965 in a cargo plane with extra-wide doors. Bowhead whales are an iconic species closely tied to Alaska Indigenous cultures in western and northern Alaska. This was a rare success story in marine mammal conservation.
You've heard no doubt of the Iron Maiden, the 1970s English heavy metal band - here was Iron Matriarch, made in 2002 from spruce, copper leafing, acrylic leafing, metal nails, and tacks.
Fish head crochet hooks:
The cribbage board with seals reminded me of the wonderful hours my father and I played the game eons ago.
Steven and I bought a smaller version of an Indigenous drum when our cruise stopped in Ketchikan, earlier on our trip. It is something we still admire every day!
Wanting to spend time outside, we drove to Creamer's Field Migratory Waterfowl Refuge, on a repurposed dairy farm, which was legendary for the sandhill cranes that flock there every summer. The Creamer family first came north in the 1897 Klondike Gold Rush, when their son Charlie was just eight years old. As a young man in Fairbanks, he gained many skills while working a variety of jobs, including harvesting hay and milking cows for the Hinckley family. Meanwhile, Anna Carr came north to Nome with her sister's family, the Hinckleys, and moved with them to Fairbanks, where she operated Golden Grocery for several years.
After serving in World War I, Charlie married Anna, and they operated a chicken farm in Washington for six years before returning to Fairbanks in 1927. The following year, they borrowed $12,000 to buy the Hinckley Dairy. Though they started with only 14 cows, Creamer's Dairy was soon on its way to becoming the largest dairy in the state, both for production and processing.
However, by the 1960s, competition from dairies in the lower 48 states, new regulations, and property taxes made operating Creamer's Dairy increasingly difficult. The state purchased 250 acres of dairy lands using state and federal funds. In 1970, the farm fields and 1,500 acres of surrounding state land were designated the Fairbanks Wildlife Management Area. The arrival of geese each spring was a cherished event for the Creamer family and the community. When the dairy closed in 1966, the family and the public wanted to save the fields for the migratory waterfowl.
The dream came true after bake sales, penny drives, and other community fundraising efforts helped the state purchase the dairy fields. Today, the refuge includes fields, historic buildings, and an additional 1,500 acres of wetlands and forests managed for wildlife and the public. The dairy buildings were placed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1977. The Alaska Legislature established the Creamer's Field Migratory Waterfowl Refuge in 1979.
We wandered through the forest along the Boreal Forest Trail and then strolled through the open fields on the Farm Road Trail. The short nature hikes showcased the beauty of interior Alaska's wetlands.
Sandhill cranes leave their wintering grounds each spring in Texas, New Mexico, and Mexico, with hundreds of thousands stopping at the Platte River, before continuing on to Alaska and Siberia. What a thrill to finally see the large, elegant birds known for their long legs and distinctive bugling calls. I had had no idea that sandhill cranes were among the oldest known bird species, with fossils dating back millions of years.
The mosaics on the sidewalks surrounding the Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitor Center were based on traditional Athabascan artwork, inspired explicitly by beadwork on moosehide slippers.
There, we learned that in Fairbanks during September, almost an hour of daylight is lost every night. Glimmering northern lights return as fall turns to winter.
According to the center, during the winter, people in Fairbanks, "Don't hibernate in winter. We celebrate... A lot of folks think that it's just too cold and that we hide out all winter long indoors."
On the center's grounds was the Walter and Mary Ellen Gould cabin, dating to 1910. It gave us a glimpse into the early days on the edge of Fairbanks when Mary Ellen cooked on a wood stove, carried water by the bucket, and spent evenings with her husband reading or sewing. The Goulds, like other homeowners in early Fairbanks, kept their cabin simple and small to ease construction and minimize the amount of firewood to cut and haul for heating and cooking.
But Fairbanks wasn't devoid of creature comforts in 1905, as it had a small local phone system and a basic electrical plant. The cabin was one of the few from early Fairbanks still on its original site. That was mainly due to the pioneer Burnett family, which owned it for many decades and helped preserve this part of the original Fairbanks.
Next post: Fairbanks Cultural Center, the North Pole, and Chena Hot Springs.
Posted on December 29th, 2025, on our last day in San Francisco, where we've had a blast hanging out with our son, his wife, and their three children, who range in age from 18 months to 5 and a half. May the New Year bring good health and safe travels for you and your loved ones.
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