North to Alaska: Day 9

Alaska Day 9

Tok to Fairbanks

9/1/11

I awoke with a renewed desire to go running again. I run partly because I enjoy it, and partly as an effort to forestall the onset of the dreaded disease PRM, which in the medical community stands for Premature Rigor Mortis. It’s quite apparent that some of the fellow passengers are beginning to show some symptoms of the early stages of this. In fact I was certain that a man sitting across from me on the bus, motionless for two hours, had succumbed to this, but as it turned out he was just in a deep sleep and awoke with a snort when I prodded him. Anyway, I managed a 45 minute run up and down the main road through town. Tok’s claim to fame is that it is the “Sled Dog Capital of Alaska.” In spite of this, I didn’t see a single dog in town, or any sleds for that matter. I think their “Capital” status may be in jeopardy. More disappointingly, there wasn’t a single pastry shop in sight so I returned empty handed.

On the bus we saw a documentary about the building of the Alaska Highway. This 1400 mile engineering feat was accomplished in a mere 9 month stretch of time at the start of World War 2 when there was great worry that the US would be invaded by Japan via Alaska. It essentially connects the lower 48 to Alaska through Canada. I could really appreciate how difficult this must have been due to the vastness of the forests, the difficulty of dealing with the permafrost, and the extreme cold.

Our first stop of the day was at Rika’s roadhouse. This was what passed as a hotel in the early 1900’s. Travelers would arrive on foot and travel from roadhouse to roadhouse, about 15 miles apart, on their journeys. They provided a bed and a hot meal for purchase, eerily similar to the Westmark Inns of today. (Had Holland America existed then, I’m sure they would have bought them all up and turned them into Westmarks.) Eventually the roadhouses went out of business when the automobile became the predominant means of transportation.

The next stop was in the town of Fox where we got a close up view of the Alaskan pipeline. This 48 inch diameter pipe stretches 800 miles from Prudhoe Bay in the North to Valdez in the south where it is pumped onto tankers. The final cost for this was 1 billion dollars which in terms of oil company money is just a drop in the bucket. Up close you see that the pipeline is not ridged but flexible vertically and horizontally to account for the movement of the land related to changes in temperature. They also run “pigs” through this periodically between pumping stations to keep it clean. They are running less oil through this all the time and there is already debate about what to do with this pipeline when the oil runs out.

Our next to last stop of the day was at “Gold Dredge number 8”, near Fairbanks. Here we were served lunch (stew and rolls) family style before getting our tour of the dredge. It was quite a machine with the sole purpose of extracting as much gold from the soil as possible with absolutely no regard to the environment. One “exhibit” was a crate of prehistoric bones that had been collected there, some likely belonging to saber toothed tigers and mastodons that were mixed in with the muck, scooped up by the dredges and spit out the back. Doesn’t sound like they had an archeologist on staff.

After that we were driven a short distance over to the El Dorado Mine, where we got a Disney-like history of gold mining aboard a narrow gauge railroad and then got to see a modern sluice in action. Finally, we got to try our hand at gold panning the old fashioned way. We were given a small sack of “paydirt” which we then put into a pan and then slowly and carefully kept dipping in water allowing small bits of dirt and gravel to run off. As gold is 18 times heavier than water, we were eventually left with pure gold in the bottom of the pan. Shockingly, it really worked! There were gold flakes at the bottom of our pan which we carefully picked up with a dry finger and then tapped into a container. You then brought it inside to have it weighed. Kris got $8 worth of gold and I got $24. Although we were hoping to recover an amount equal to the cost of our vacation, it was nonetheless surprisingly satisfying and a lot of fun to do. After this experience, I’m convinced that I would have done well as a Klondiker provided that I had a nice chair to sit in with lumbar support while I was panning, a warm place to sleep at night preferably with in-floor heating, a good shower with nice water pressure, a chef, a computer, a masseuse, etc. Yes, I would have been really good at it.

After we had recovered from the euphoria brought on by “gold fever”, we were brought over to our hotel in Fairbanks, surprisingly another Westmark, and then went out to a great Thai food restaurant recommended by Randy. After walking briefly by the river we headed back to the hotel with the excitement that tomorrow we’d be heading to Denali.