We had to have our luggage out by 6:30, but did not have to meet for departure until 9:40, so while we could not really sleep in, we had a lazy morning eating some up-scale instant oatmeal and coffee shop drinks at the little kitchenette in our spacious room.
We took a short bus ride to the tiny town of Fox to tour Gold Dredge #8, a restored dredge operated by the Fairbanks Exploration Company from 1928 to 1959.
Gold was found near Fairbanks in 1902. Some gold was found at the surface, but within a few years the majority was mined by digging shafts a hundred feet or less through river rock down to bedrock which could then be mined horizontally. After a decade or so, that source played out and Fairbanks began to fade a bit. But then a large company did some surveying and testing and determined that a large-scale approach of sloughing off the river rock, then dredging the layer closer to the bedrock might be profitable. It was profitable, but altered the landscape even more than dredge work usually does. First they used boring rods and water to melt the permafrost, then hydraulic cannons to wash away the hundred or so feet of soil and rock that the miners had been mining through from a huge area of the valley. Then they began dredging after that. It was a costly undertaking both in terms of effort and in environmental damage, but it paid off many times over.
The description of the Gold Dredge #8 tour sounded a bit corny, but we were really impressed and had a good time. We had been seeing lots of old mining equipment rusting away on display during the past few days, but they had an old boiler fired up with wood driving a small steam engine that showed how a system of pulleys and cable could pull a load of rock up from a shaft, move it some distance, then drop the load.
They had another display showing how the boring “points” (sharp rods with a water outlet at the tip) were used to thaw the permafrost.
Then we saw the dredge along with a video showing how it handled the gravel inside, then a demonstration of gold panning, then we were each given a small bag of sand and gravel and a gold pan, and we got to pan out a few flakes of gold. It was a bit challenging and lots of fun. Once you start spotting gold flakes in your pan, it’s easy to get “gold fever”! My nephew liked it so much he immediately wanted to do it again, and they let him and his brother have another bag. My wife found about $33 worth of flakes, and I got about $12.
There was a huge gift shop where they weighed our gold flakes. They had free cocoa and cookies (really good cookies!), and my wife found a sweatshirt she liked, and we picked up a few Moosetard mustards as gifts for people at home.
The dredge is located right next to the Alyeska Pipeline, the big oil pipeline built in the 1970’s to bring oil from Prudhoe Bay south to an “ice free year-round” port, Valdez. Our tour guide, who is a high school teacher during the school year and who clearly enjoyed educating people, spoke briefly about the history and economic significance of this pipeline.
The bus took us back to Fairbanks and parked downtown so we could find lunch for ourselves. We found a nice Thai restaurant with my sister-in-law and split a green curry with avocado for lunch.
Then we got back in the bus and drove about an hour to a little RV park resort which had a really lovely garden full of lettuces and cole plants. Someone there had some welding skills and had made their own “snow cat”.
Finally after another 45 minutes we arrived at the McKinley Chalet near Denali National Park. This large hotel/motel resort is owned by Holland America, and there is another huge complex next door owned by Princess (which, like Holland America, is owned by Carnival). Our room was nice, but the only WiFi is in the main building up the hill.
We walked down the road past a number of gift shops to a liquor store and bought a few bottles of wine and a couple of German Hefeweizens (Weihenstephaner and a Schneider Weisse Tap 7 we’d never seen before).
Then we went to dinner at the Prospectors Historic Alehouse Pizzeria. This place makes excellent and original pizzas and has 49 beers on tap. My wife had a Triple Karmeliet that was as good as we remembered from Belgium. I had a Cynosure Brewing (Anchorage) Saison. It was good with only a little banana flavor. Then she got a Kasteel Rouge (kriek from Belgium) and I tried Glacier Brewhouse’s (Anchorage again) Hefeweizen. Our pizza had gyro meat, cheese and olive oil. Added after baking was feta, red onion, and tomatoe with tzatziki served on the side. It was delicious! And we had a skillet chocolate chip cookie for dessert.
