Striking Gold in Fairbanks

This is the result of our panning for gold at El Dorado Gold Mine.

The truck driver was lonely and wanted to chat. He lives in a man house, he told us. It has seven rooms with three bunks to a room. He misses his wife and his granddaughter and he says, “Money isn't everything.” But it surely helps him.
He told us his story as we sat outside the wi-fi connection at the Border City (Alaska) RV Park. He said he works between 10 and 16 hours a day. He is paid $34.75 an hour for the first eight hours and gets time and a half for anything over that. His lodging is paid for, as well as three meals a day. Tomorrow (Sunday) is steak night, he said with relish. When he heads out, driving his gravel truck, he is given two massive sandwiches for his lunch break.
“The only thing I have to pay for is cigarettes and toothpaste,” he said. So the money is useful. He has paid down half his mortgage on his home back in Edmonton, Alberta. But he still misses the wife and granddaughter.
“Last winter,” he told us, “I just packed up and went home for the dark time. Who needs the money that bad?”
I had asked him earlier in the conversation if he is paid by the shift or the season, or what. “Oh, no. We're all union up here. We're Teamsters. We get paid by the hour for every hour on the job.” And the job includes maintaining his rig. But he'd still not convinced that the money is worth it. “I sure miss that granddaughter,” he said as we left him.

Sunday, June 20
We're in Delta Junction, the official end to the 1443-mile Alaska Highway. The Alaska Pipeline – four feet in diameter, comes through Delta Junction on its way to Valdez, 240 miles to the south. When we parked at a little RV park on the outskirts of this town of 800 souls, there seemed to be no one at the park office. A sign directed me to the next door down and I knocked. A woman's voice called for me to come in. A woman in her 80s sat ensconced in heaps of papers and other debris. I asked about staying the night and she said, “It's $17. Pick any empty site.” She filled out some paperwork for herself and I handed over the cash. I asked if she was English because I detected a slight accent. “I'm Australian. Came here with my husband in 1966. He was Norwegian and I guess he felt Alaska was similar to Norway,” she said. We chatted for a while about Alaska and Australia and then I went back to our rig and picked a level site.
It was a little low at the rear wheels so I switched on our handy-dandy hydraulic jacks and began raising the rear of the rig. Suddenly I had a pink stream of hydraulic fluid gushing from behind the front wheels of the rig. I'd blown a hose. Happily, I was able to retract the half-lowered jacks on the rear. I fretted for a while, then called our road support system. They told me it was not a huge deal, that the driving would be in no way impaired.
We drove to the little town's gas station to see if someone in town could help us with the problem and were told the only guy would be Andy McNabb. We stopped by the Visitor's Center to ask for directions and the 20-something girl behind the desk, suggested I try 24-Hour Collision and Towing. “They taught Andy everything he knows,” the girl said. Sensing a slight conflict of interest, I asked if she was related to the folks at 24-Hour Collision. “That's my dad,” she said. Ah, a little bias here, I thought. But I thanked her and left with the numbers for all of the repair operations in town.
Next morning, I called 24-Hour and the girl's mom told me they could not repair the rig. She suggested I call Andy McNabb, which I did. Andy said bring it in and he could fix it. We did and he did in an hour. We had pinched the hose on one of our mighty hops over the jack-rabbit road into Alaska. We were on the road and on our way to Fairbanks inside the hour.

Fairbanks on Mid-summer's night. The perfect place. Sun sets at 12:47 a.m. And it rises at 2:57 a.m. Length of day: 21 hours, 50 minutes and 13 seconds.

I should mention there is no car or SUV or truck with Alaskan plates up here that does not have a pigtail of an electric plug hanging out the front grille. Every vehicle – EVERY vehicle – sports these to heat the engine block during the heartless -40 degree days that await in the cruel winters. To make life tolerable, you can purchase a device that switches on your vehicle's engine when the oil temperature drops to a specific temperature. The car runs for 8 minutes, then turns itself off. That's technology you won't need most other places.

Tuesday, June 22
We went off on the tourism trail today when we took passage on a stern-wheelers and cruised the Chena River, down to where it joins the mighty Tanana River. At the confluence, you could clearly see the chalky white Tanana meet and swirls its way to the west with the relatively clear Chena. It looked like coffee creamer was mixing with the coffee-colored water. Salmon that were born seven years ago and made their way downstream for they journey to the Pacific would return to the Chena, among other rivers and we marveled at their ability to find their way home to within 50 feet of where they started out – even though the rivers have changed course during their time of travel.

Along the way, we stopped along the river at an Athabaskan village where we were treated to the culture and the lifestyle of these people. We learned, interestingly, there is no word for “goodbye” in the Athabaskan tongue. It is just a word that has no place since it would indicate you'll not return. “Good luck” is used instead.
We were treated to a display of the superb parkas, made by the people. The best of these use wolverine fur because human skin will never freeze when it is covered by wolverine. In addition, caribou, ermine, arctic fox and beaver skins are used.
The boat was nearly full, including many busloads of people who had come up by cruise ship to Skagway and were then moved north and west, via railroad and buses. These folks would travel to Denali National Park, then Anchorage before flying home to the U.S.
We met, also along the riverbank, with the husband of one of Alaska's great mushers – a woman who had three times won the Ididarod Race from Anchorage to Nome. Susan Bucher died recently from cancer after running the 1,000-mile race a total of 17 times. Her husband spoke to us from the bank after demonstrating how he harnesses his dog team to an all-terrain vehicle and exercises them by flying through the bush at 23 miles an hour.

Wednesday, June 23
We continued on the tourism trail by heading out of town to the El Dorado Gold Mine. This is an old mine that you reach by train. We passed through a permafrost tunnel where a miner explained that the safe thing to do is to scrape and dig up the permafrost in the winter months. You drag the frozen dirt to the surface and stack it until the summer months. This is because the permafrost can be carved in the wintertime but if you expose it to the summer heat it will become mud and the mine could collapse.
The miners always are searching for the bedrock where the lode of gold might have found its way.
The old style mining was incredibly destructive to the environment, of course. Streams were rerouted and the mined permafrost was hit by steam that was generated by cutting down all of the fragile trees (fragile because it takes years for a tree to grow up here on a permafrost landscape.
We pulled into the sluicing area and watched demonstrations of panning for gold before being handed our dirt and a pan. Our job was to work our dirt out of the pan and find the grains of gold. Sure enough, I found $25.20 worth of gold and Jo managed to pan $10.10 cents worth. We proudly went to the gold doctor and he was happy to sell us a locket into which we could pour our gold dust. Now that's tourism of the highest order.
We drove back to Fairbanks and visited the amazing Museum of the North at University of Alaska. Very dramatic architecture. Inside, we were able to see only a tiny portion of the museum before power failed and we were required to wait in the lobby. We waited and waited for an hour. Still no lights. So we abandoned this adventure and asked for our money to be refunded.
Before the lights went out, though, I discovered that Aleuts in Alaska were removed from their homes in the out islands of the Aleutian chain of islands when the Japanese bombed Dutch Harbor in 1942. Dutch Harbor, as some of you may know, is the home base for the current crab fishing fleet that is featured in the weekly TV show “Dangerous Catch.”
We decided to head on south from Fairbanks because of the beautiful weather. We want to see Mount McKinley at Denali National Park. We made the 140-mile journey in good time and pulled into an RV campground just north of the entrance to the park. There we met up with two couples also from Florida. I asked them why they are following us!