Fairbanks Area - Pioneer Park - Athabasca - Iditarod

PIONEER PARK

        Within Fairbanks we toured the Pioneer Park, a lovely park with three museums, historic buildings, old mining equipment,  shops and the famous salmon bake. We did not eat there, because at $38.00 per person, we decided we could not eat that much. 

        This morning we took a Riverboat Tour.  A paddle wheeler that goes up the Chena River till the Tenana River.  This tourism oriented business runs like a well oiled machine and reminded me a bit of Disneyworld. 

Athabasca

We stopped at an Athabascan village along the shores of the Chena.   It was interesting to see how these native people survived the harsh elements of north central Alaska.  They were hunter, gathers, and moved to where the food source was, setting up a fish camp in summer and staying at their base camp in the winter.

Their huts were made of bent spruce branches, caribou hide laid on top, a vent in the middle for the smoke from the fire.  Spruce branches on the ground and caribou hide on top to form the mattress. 

The tools they had were made from the resources they could find; bones, antlers, rocks and wood.

The Athabascan people fished the salmon in the rivers and preserved it by drying and then smoking it.  The chum was caught and dried for the dogs, each dog eating 1 dried salmon per day.  The sockeye, and king salmon was for human consumption.  They had primitive snow shoes made from birch and tied with strips of raw hide. 

The transportation was by birchbark canoes or sleds, with dogs or not.  When the “white man” came, the style of housing changed and they used spruce logs, sealed the spaces between the logs with moss.  They had sod roofs, which I found very interesting since that was the same in Norway. 

The Athabascans are well known for their bead work.  Clothing was made from caribou and moose hides.  Winter clothing from fur, and decorated with beads.

IDITAROD 

        Also on the River boat we saw the Susan Butcher family Iditarod dog sled team.  The Iditarod trail race goes from Anchorage to Nome, 1,150 miles, over some of the most difficult terrain there is.

 The Alaskan husky is much smaller then I thought and as the trainer explained most of us get them confused with Siberian huskies.

The dogs run 50 miles ( 80 k ) per day to train for the Iditarod race.  This family alone has over 125 dogs, and their full time job is working and training with the dogs. 

There is also a well known race between Dawson City to Fairbanks called the Yukon Quest. 

        

        Sled dog racing is very popular in Alaska.   While travelling through Alaska we have seen several homebased for these teams.  During our stay at Chena Hot Springs we were walking Tico when out of no where a race team came thundering towards us.  The dogs were all aiming for Tico and the dog musher was fighting to keep them away.  I had handed Tico over to Henry quickly because I wasn’t sure what would happen.  In the last second the lead dog veered away and the team went back to the trail.  It was a bit scary.   Also while staying at this Hot Springs Resort, we had asked about a hiking trail, we were told about this circle trail to a lake.   This trail looped back through the dog kennel.  We had no choice but to walk right in the middle of 150 barking Alaskan huskies.  The were all tied up or behind fence except for two of them.   Thos two were scary enough and the noise of they howling and barking was eery.