Yukon River at the Arctic Circle

Day 6 – Wednesday, July 3, 2024 – Fairbanks, Alaska

This is the day we were supposed to fly to Fairbanks and then take a bus to Denali. We had learned on Tuesday that we would be spending the time originally scheduled in Denali in Fairbanks instead. Obviously disappointed, but what we had been expecting ever since we heard about the fire.

This was the earliest start to the day to this point of the trip. I'm not a morning person, so I wasn't thrilled that we had to have our luggage set out by 7am. Because there's not a terminal at the airport, we checked in with the airline representatives at the hotel. By 8am, we were on the bus to the airport. Since we were flying from Dawson City to Fairbanks, Alaska, this was an international flight. Security was done by manually inspecting our carry-on bags on a folding table and quickly scanning us with handheld wands. Many of the airline/airport employees had multiple jobs as we saw the same people checking us in at the hotel, doing security, and guiding the airplane on the ground.

We were to our hotel in Fairbanks by 11am, ate lunch in the hotel restaurant, and then took the shuttle to Pioneer Park, which opened in 1967 to celebrate the centennial of the Alaska Purchase. It looked like a nearly 50-year-old park that could use some tender loving care but was still enjoyable. The thing I found the most interesting was The Harding Car which was the train car President Harding rode in when he came to Alaska in 1923 to drive the Golden Spike for the Alaska Railroad.

One of the things that we had been looking forward to, as well as time at Denali National Park, was an excursion from Denali, flying north of the Arctic Circle to Coldfoot, Alaska, home to the world's northernmost truck stop. When our plans got changed, Keith was able to get us rebooked on the same excursion out of Fairbanks Wednesday evening. Wednesday afternoon, we got a phone call that because of the weather, they couldn’t fly into Coldfoot. They had a flight earlier in the day that couldn’t land and had to turn back. They then offered us a flight to Fort Yukon, Alaska, a native community, still north of the Arctic Circle, so we took it. 

There was no truck stop or place to buy souvenirs, but we were greeted by a local woman who took us on a tour around town. Fort Yukon (Gwichyaa Zhee in the Gwich'in language), with a population of less than 500, is far from any highway and over 100 river miles from “civilization”. The residents are largely self-sufficient as it is so expensive to have anything shipped in. We stopped outside our guide's parent's house where we were greeted by her father and her four-year-old son. Both were a delight as her father shared more about their family history, and her son was a 4-year-old giving everyone a hug and making you smile.