Fairbanks, AlaskaFairbanks, AlaskaIt is really hard to figure out what to say about a place where
you lived most of your adult life, but I'll try to hit some of the highlights
with a few pictures from my photo album.
The history of Alaska is so recent that it seems always present. I remember talking with Johnny Frank in Venetie about his recollections of the white man's first arrival in the Chandelar region of Alaska. When I met Johnny, he was 97 years old and lived a subsistence lifestyle with his wife Sarah (95) and a man named Ambrose (96) as the only residents of Gold Camp, Alaska. Johnny was a living bridge between ancient history and the present.
Two of us tried, unsuccessfully--I must admit, to ski one April
about 70 miles from Venetie across the rugged Brooks Range mountains to
Gold Camp to see Johnny. We got lost in a "whiteout" snowstorm
and when the temperature dropped on April 12 to -25°, my summer-weight
sleeping bag proved inadequate. I did push-ups and sit-ups for hours, but
finally fell asleep. My skiing companion saw me leaving the tent in the
night in my underwear and realized I was hypothermic, so he dragged me back
to his sleeping bag, where I warmed up and recovered. We abandoned our cross-country
ski trip and returned to Venetie.
In Fairbanks, the old sourdoughs make it pretty easy to capture the feel
of the gold rush.
The winter before we left Fairbanks, we experienced three weeks
of temperatures of about -70 degrees. It hit -84° at Chandelar, Alaska
that winter, but the US Weather Service had no thermometers certified to
measure temperatures that cold, so no record was set. It was so cold that
ABC television's NightLine program focused one of its shows on the Fairbanks
weather. Anchor Ted Koppel explained that the -70° wasn't a "chill
index," that the concept has no meaning at such temperatures, but that
with the wind, the chill index would be about -200°. At those temperatures,
everything freezes. All of the ignition wiring on my car was cracked and
the gaskets were shot. Just think what harm takes place when the car goes
from +70° to -70° with the opening of the garage door.
One day it was so cold that the power steering unit my wife's truck froze
solid and cracked in half. The tires on one of my cars were high in nylon
content, so if I left it out in the cold, they'd lose their "bead"
and deflate. My solution: jack up all 4 wheels every night, remove all 4
tires and take them into the house. I repeated that process daily for weeks
one winter.
At the house shown below, I had to put chains on my truck every
night and back down the driveway. The driveway was too steep to chain-up
at the bottom and I had to plug in the circulating engine heater at the
house. I used the outhouse there at -45° just once .
On the other hand, winters were wonderful. Between sledding,
snowshoeing, skiing and snowmobiling, we had a lot of fun through the winter.
I taught for about 10 years at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
It used to be called the University of Alaska and then the Community College
in Anchorage was elevated to the University of Alaska Anchorage and the
campus in Fairbanks became UAF. The statewide administration of the University
of Alaska is still located in Fairbanks. The University is a major influence
on the community.
UAF has a great museum. One of the displays deals with the historical relationship between Alaska and Russia. The import of tea from Russia was a major business.
My grandfather and namesake was the US Ambassador to Russia before
the Russian revolution and had an important role in the tea trade, as reflected
by his letterhead stationery.
(scanned)When we first moved to Fairbanks, I worked as Supervising Attorney for Alaska Legal Services Corporation in charge of providing free legal help to people in the northern half of the state. I traveled to numerous Indian villages throughout Alaska's Interior and got to know some really wonderful Athabascan Indian people. There were no public accommodations or stores in most of the villages. I slept on the floors of houses, schools and churches. I got to eat lots of moose stew and such treats as sheefish ice cream (sheefish--a whitefish-like fish is mixed with cranberries--tastes great).
Native people have been using various mechanisms for centuries to trap salmon as they migrate up the rivers and streams of Alaska. They still use fish wheels.
As the economy in the Alaska "bush" evolves from subsistence to money, Native people move to the cities and take jobs and the traditional crafts (ivory carving, doll making, etc.) are fading away. The UAF Museum has some gorgeous examples of Native arts and crafts.
Denali, the Great One, is an absolutely spectacular mountain.
Unlike other huge mountains around the world, Mt. McKinley stands pretty
much alone with a base only a few hundred feet above sea level. We've spent
many wonderful vacations around Denali, both summer (backpacking, whitewater
rafting) and winter (cross-country skiing and camping).
As you can see from my pictures and you'll realize as you read what I have to say on this website, we moved from Michigan to Alaska because we loved the outdoors. Alaskans live their waking hours outside. The famous dog musher, Mary Shields (first woman to win the Iditarod) is said to have built a log cabin, but when winter neared and it was time to close it up with a roof, she balked, saying she couldn't bear to block the view of the stars and northern lights.
I'm not big on killing things, but I love hunting, fishing, skiing, hiking, backpacking, canoeing, flying, snowshoeing, sightseeing, bicycling, and swinging from vines in Hawaii (how did that get in here?); any excuse to be outdoors.
The environment in Alaska is incredibly fragile. In the 70's many of us were concerned that development of the Alaska Oil Pipeline would adversely impact the ecosystem. The Exxon Valdez disaster proved our fears well-founded, but I believe that our environmental activism helped to preserve Alaska.
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© Ed Noonan 1996, 1997