Fairbanks

Top things to do in Fairbanks

1. 01

   The northern lights - Cleary Summit, Murphy Dome and the dark ridges out of town

   scenic nature wildlife 👍 Popular

   Fairbanks sits under the ring of auroral activity that circles the pole, which is why aurora tours run out of here nightly through the dark half of the year. The routine is to drive twenty minutes or so out of the city glow to a high, open spot, then wait with a thermos: Cleary Summit on the Steese Highway and Murphy Dome to the northwest are the standard pullouts, and the university's geophysical institute publishes a forecast most operators work from. Give yourself at least three nights, because cloud beats you more often than the sun does.

2. 02

   Chena Hot Springs - soak in the rock lake, then walk into the Aurora Ice Museum

   wellness scenic ⭐ Highly recommended

   An hour and a half northeast at the end of its own road, this is a working geothermal resort where the outdoor soaking pool is a boulder-lined lake at natural spring temperature, steaming hard against the cold. Alongside it sits a year-round ice hotel kept frozen by geothermal power, with carved chandeliers, ice bedrooms and a bar serving a martini in a glass cut from ice. In winter people soak with their hair freezing and watch for the aurora from the water.

3. 03

   University of Alaska Museum of the North - Blue Babe and a room that plays the aurora

   culture arts history ⭐ Highly recommended

   The best museum in interior Alaska, in a white sculpted building on the campus ridge with the Alaska Range on the horizon behind it. Inside are Blue Babe, a steppe bison mummy pulled out of the permafrost after tens of thousands of years, strong Alaska Native and contemporary northern art galleries, and The Place Where You Go to Listen, a room whose light and sound shift in real time with the seismic, solar and auroral data coming in from around the state.

4. 04

   Riverboat Discovery - a sternwheeler down the Chena to a mushing kennel and an Athabascan village

   culture arts history 👍 Popular

   The signature summer half day, run by a river family that has been working these waters for generations. The paddlewheeler drops downriver with a bush plane taking off alongside it, stops at a sled dog kennel where a team is hitched and run for the crowd, and ties up at a recreated Athabascan village where guides talk through fish wheels, salmon drying and skin sewing. Touristy and unashamed of it, and genuinely good on interior history.

5. 05

   Pioneer Park - the relocated gold-rush town and the sternwheeler Nenana

   history culture arts 👍 Popular

   A city park built for the centennial of the Alaska Purchase, filled with actual gold-rush cabins hauled in from around town and reassembled as a walkable street of small museums and shops. The centrepiece is the SS Nenana, one of the last big wooden sternwheelers left anywhere, sitting in dry dock with a huge dioramic model of the river route inside. An air museum, a railroad museum, a carousel and a summer salmon bake fill out the rest.

6. 06

   Creamer's Field - cranes and geese on an old dairy farm at the city limits

   nature wildlife

   A migratory waterfowl refuge that was a working dairy until the 1960s, with the white farmhouse still standing as the visitor centre. Thousands of sandhill cranes and Canada geese drop into the fields in spring and again in late summer, and the boreal forest trails behind carry on year-round on foot, ski or snowshoe. Ten minutes from downtown on College Road.

7. 07

   Large Animal Research Station - muskoxen and reindeer on the university's hill

   nature wildlife

   A working arctic biology research station rather than a zoo, where the university keeps a herd of muskoxen along with reindeer and caribou for cold-adaptation studies. Summer tours walk you along the fence lines while a guide explains qiviut, the underwool that makes these animals viable at forty below, and how caribou manage a winter diet of lichen.

8. 08

   Gold Dredge 8 and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline viewpoint - pan for colour beside the pipe

   history

   North of town on the old Steese Highway, a narrow-gauge train runs you out to a beached bucket-line dredge, the machine that chewed through the creek valleys here for decades, and you get a poke of paydirt to wash out in a trough at the end. Nearly everyone pairs it with the pipeline viewpoint a couple of minutes away, where a raised section of the trans-Alaska line runs overhead on its heat-shedding supports with a cleaning pig on display underneath.

9. 09

   Chena River State Recreation Area - Angel Rocks and the Granite Tors

   hiking scenic

   The outdoor half of the Chena Hot Springs Road, a river valley of spruce and birch with the best walking near the city. Angel Rocks is a short steep loop to granite outcrops above the river and does for an afternoon; the Granite Tors loop is a long, exposed day up onto a tundra plateau studded with freestanding rock pillars. The river itself is a gentle canoe paddle in summer.

10. 10

    Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitors Center - interior Alaska explained on the riverbank

    culture arts history

    The place to start, downtown beside the Chena, with free exhibits on Athabascan life, subsistence, aurora science and the country north of here, plus a public lands desk that will talk you through road conditions and trailheads. Outside are Golden Heart Plaza with its Unknown First Family statue, and the antler arch built from shed moose and caribou racks.

11. 11

    Dog mushing - ride behind a team on the Goldstream trails

    adventure nature wildlife

    Fairbanks is a mushing town at its core, with long-distance sled dog races running in and out of the city for decades and working kennels scattered through the valleys around it. Winter visits mean a ride behind a team through birch forest; in summer several kennels swap the sled for a wheeled cart and put you in the yard with the puppies instead.

12. 12

    The midnight sun - the weeks around the solstice when it simply does not get dark

    scenic

    For roughly two months either side of midsummer Fairbanks never reaches true darkness, and around the solstice itself the sun is up for close to twenty-two hours. It reorganises the whole town: golf and softball at midnight, gardens producing outsized vegetables for the summer market, a local baseball tradition of playing the solstice game late into the night without switching on any lights. Bring an eye mask, because the hotel curtains are rarely enough.

13. 13

    Fox - the Turtle Club and Silver Gulch, ten miles up the Steese

    food

    Eating out in Fairbanks is unfussy and mostly involves a short drive. The old mining settlement of Fox holds two of the institutions: a low-slung roadhouse famous for slabs of prime rib that people book well ahead, and a brewery billed as the northernmost in the country, pouring its own beer in a dining room full of locals. In town, a restored riverside gold-mining pump station is the other long-standing dinner address.

Getting to & around Fairbanks

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