Our Arrival in Fairbanks
Saturday-Sunday 8-9 November, 2025
Eric's photo of a bend in the Chena River.
Our aging bodies make air travel uncomfortable for Eric and quite painful for me. Eric had been reluctant to get on an airplane since the enormous disappointment of catching COVID on a flight in January of 2024 and missing an event he had very much wanted to attend. I had convinced him that pre-Thanksgiving November should be a reasonably low-COVID time to fly. But we were unable to fly from San Francisco to Fairbanks without an annoying transfer in Seattle. Our air travel was complicated by the fact that, a couple of days before we left, the head of the FAA started forcing airports to cancel 40% of flights in an (eventually successful) attempt to force the discontinuation of vital health insurance subsidies and thus resolve an absurd government shutdown.
We were also very concerned about Fortitude, who had received a definitive lymphoma diagnosis and started chemotherapy eight days before we left. The doctor had said that Forti had time and that we should not postpone the trip, but that it would be too soon to know whether the chemo was working before we left. We arranged the best care we could for Forti, and we did see him perk up a bit in the last two days before our departure.
So we set out on the trip with much more apprehension than anticipation, worried that we shouldn't be leaving home at all.
We were delayed half an hour leaving San Francisco, but we had two hours to catch the flight in Seattle, so we made it to Fairbanks on time.
Eric photographed a beautiful sunset over Seattle from the plane.
A light snow was falling as we stepped out of the airport in Fairbanks, into the frigid air. Our late evening arrival meant that we could not pick up our rental vehicle until morning, so we took a rideshare in an AWD Prius to our lodging, an extended stay annex to the Seven Gables Inn.
Seven Gables Inn annex.
Our room, which we unfortunately failed to photograph before unpacking into it. I loved the heated floors!
There was plenty of room for working and cooking.
We even had a little outdoor balcony, although it was much too cold to use it! It was unpleasant even opening the door wide enough to take the picture.
Although located far north in the interior of Alaska, Fairbanks is a developed city of about 32,500 people. The University of Alaska has a large campus there, and the city has a relatively young and diverse population. This is Alaska, so of course most of the economy is based on mineral extraction. And not just oil--there is a large gold mine not far outside of town. Large chains seem to comprise most of the retail outlets, but we visited some local businesses as well.
We were surprised to see many people bicycling around Fairbanks, some on ebikes and some on muscle-powered bikes, but all with, of course, very fat tires. Further west on the Parks Highway, we saw a group of people with helmets and rope setting out on a canyoneering adventure just as the sun was going down. I met a research SCUBA diver who told me that local divers would cut holes in the ice and dive in the area lakes. "We have a real outdoor culture," she told me.
The card checker at Costco remarked on how I was all bundled up in a hat and coat, so I guess I must have looked like a tourist. But I did also notice that people were spending a lot of time sitting in their cars with the engines running, frequently in line for drive-through coffee or fast food.
A Costco customer making a colorful commentary on the weather.
Notice the ice machine in the background. How much can they really sell?
But all of that we would find out later. We got up Sunday morning with nothing to eat but a few Clif bars in our bags. We needed to buy food for the week. In order to do that, we needed to take another Lyft to pick up our rental vehicle.
We rented this behemoth. Her name is Bofuri.
Eric took a picture of Bofuri's name on the windshield. Bofuri is named after an anime character who, when gaming, maximizes defensive strategies, sometimes at the expense of stamina or mental health. It seems appropriate.
As we have been burned in the past by rental car agencies who gave us a high-clearance 2WD vehicle when we wanted 4WD, and rental car agencies who rented us cars with bald tires, no snow brush, or no windshield washer fluid in the northeastern winter, I was determined not to repeat those unfortunate experiences. Back in April when I started planning to go to Fairbanks, I investigated how to make sure that we got an actual 4WD vehicle. I communicated with Salmon Berry Tours, which has been an invaluable source of local information even though they were not organizing our tour.
When I asked the Salmon Berry representatives for an agency that would absolutely rent us a 4WD vehicle, they referred me to Go North. The Go North staff were super friendly, as were most people in Fairbanks. Eric felt that Bofuri was quite a bit of overkill and difficult to park, that a Nissan Rogue with studded snow tires would have been just fine. And, while the rest of our trip was accomplished with very little expenditure, Bofuri did not come at all cheaply. But I had no idea whether Hertz would have given us a 4WD Rogue, and I was very comforted knowing before we headed out that we wouldn't end up with a vehicle that was inadequate for the conditions.
"You got a good car!" declared the clerk at the Seven Gables Inn. Mok, our aurora guide, remarked on the quality of Bofuri's tires.
Every time we turned off Bofuri's engine, she displayed this amusing warning. "Don't forget your kid!" Eric said, taking a picture of the screen.
The next order of business was to spend $300 on a week's worth of groceries at an intimidatingly large Fred Meyer.
Eric took pictures of our full refrigerator and cupboard.
I tried to make the most of our $6/pound tomatoes, from a hothouse in Anchorage.
After we unpacked our groceries, our plan for Sunday evening was to head out to the Chena Hot Springs, from which you are famously supposed to be able to watch the aurora, surrounded by snow and ice, while relaxing in a hot spring. Eric was finishing up a little geocaching research before we headed out, and discovered that there was an event cache in Fairbanks occurring right at that moment!
So we jumped into Bofuri and headed out to meet some local cachers!
I didn't get everyone's name, but we were with hosts Denali Duo. Photo by Eric.
The event was centered on a festival of films about geocaching. We got a bunch of giggles at various shorts highlighting the strange things we do for our unusual hobby, sharing the laughs along with others who do the same strange things. It was fun to meet some people from Fairbanks and learn about more local caches we might try to find while we were there.
We had intended to get a Costco pizza for dinner, but, by the time we left that spontaneous revel, Costco was closed. We went to a Sonic Drive-in and then drove more than an hour to the hot springs. As we drove, I solved my first sudoko puzzle, working in Google sheets on my phone, to reveal the coordinates for a cache. By the time I finished the puzzle, though, we had driven past the location.
Before entering the hot springs, we stumbled around in the dark in the snow for a while looking for a different cache, before finally deciding it was too far from the parking lot and that we would have needed snowshoes at this time of year.
We removed our boots, coats, hats, mittens, sweaters, shirts, pants, and socks. It was very cold, dashing out of the locker rooms wearing only bathing suits and towels!
The area around the springs was dark, and at first we found only this relatively cool pool. Photo by Eric.
Eventually we figured out where to go, in the springs surrounded by ice and snow, as advertised. Photo by Eric.
I don't know how anyone could see any aurora, or even much of the sky, with all of the steam rising off of the hot water. Yes, I wasn't wearing my glasses, but I'm not that blind without them, and I could barely see more than a few meters in front of me. Because the pool is mostly undeveloped, with rocks on the sides, there is only one place, along the entry ramp, where you can sit comfortably. We wandered around a large pool, unable to see its boundaries, finding variations in the water temperature. Eventually, we found the really hot part of the springs, at the opposite end from the entry point. There was a fountain there in the dim light, and, if you could tolerate the temperature, you could let the hot water rain down on your head.
Eric, standing on the entry ramp, took my picture in the steamy water. The photo shows about as well as you could see.
I thought it was quite pleasant, but Eric missed the surrounding beauty we had seen when we visited Canadian hot springs during daylight.
We did find the sudoku puzzle cashe along the road on the way back to Fairbanks. We still managed to bed by midnight so I could get up at 8:00 for a meeting at 10:00 PST/9:00 AST.
Map of our travels around Fairbanks.
Map of travels within Fairbanks.
On to the magical Aurora Borealis.