Winter fun in Fairbanks

I didn’t think I needed to put in the title, that Fairbanks is in Alaska.

We had a number of friends and family question our sanity on heading north in the winter. Since we retired, we’ve always headed south in Jan. and Feb., and I’ve been very happy. Well, seeing the Northern Lights is one of the few things that were truly on a bucket list for us.

The picture above shows sunset on our first day. I was happily surprised to find that in Feb., there was about 8 hours of daylight. And even on the winter solstice, there’s still about 5 hours of light.

That first night, we had to really bundle up when going out to see the lights, as it was -25 F air temperature (no wind chill). This was the best picture I got:

Hopefully, you can appreciate the faint green glow. Then, I must have bumped my focus ring, and the rest of my pictures looked like this -

So, that was our first night. We stayed up until about 0100, but the lights didn’t get any better.

The next day we went dog sledding, and that was pretty cool (no pun intended).

The dogs were lunging and jumping in their harnesses, despite the musher/guide having the brake or lock on the sled. This was Steve getting his mittens on, just before I joined him in the sled -

It was relatively warm that day at “only” -5 F. We were actually pretty comfortable after they covered us with a sleeping bag. The views were gorgeous -

Halfway through our hour trip, during which the dogs covered 10 miles, our guide stopped the sled to get pictures of us, and give the dogs a little breather.

We had pulled down our balaclavas for the picture, but they were absolutely needed when the dogs were running.

the time was about 1230 pm for this shot

The terrain was beautiful…

…but an hour was plenty at those temps.

We had a team of 10 dogs pulling us, and we were surprised at the size of the dogs. These are lean, running machines (and they only came up to our mid-thighs in height).

To run the Iditarod’s 1,000 mile length, they start with a team of 16, and can’t trade in any new dogs. In fact, most mushers end the race with 10 or 12 dogs.

The second night was so cloudy, that we stayed inside, watching the “Auroracam” to see if the lights might end up showing, or if the clouds would clear. This is a website that has a camera trained on the northern sky, so you could stay inside and warm, until the show got started. Most of the time, the lights are most active between 10 pm and 2 am.

I dropped out early and went to bed before 11 pm, while Steve stayed up, hoping for clearing. Just after midnight, he woke me up and said the green bands on the webcam were becoming brighter and staying there, so we quickly got dressed in 3-4 layers, and hustled out to the field behind our lodge. We looked up into the northern sky and saw…

a cloud filled sky. No aurora. The webcam is located a number of miles away from where we were staying, and is more sensitive than our eyes.

This was sunrise the next morning, just before 0900.

As we had breakfast, I was mesmerized by the colors of the Alaska Range to our south -

We had a “hybrid” car -

No, actually that was how we plugged the car in each night to an engine block and oil pan heater. Also, remote car starters are a real thing in Alaska. The guy who rented the car to us said he sees people on the plane hitting their remote starters right after they land, so the car is nice and toasty when they reach the parking lot. We used ours each night in the restaurants, as we asked for the check.

Those are modern snowshoes. I was a little disappointed. I wanted the kind you see in pictures of old that look like tennis rackets made out of rough wood. These worked well though, and we had our own personal guide for snowshoeing around the lodge property:

We were surprised at how much snow they kicked up in the back. Check out Steve’s feet, and also how well we followed our guide:

Well, you’ve already seen the dog butt pictures from the dog sledding (to add to my butt collection of pictures, that I started in Africa), so here is one for my shadow collection, that I’ll be curating in the future:

So, our third and final night in Fairbanks, we went to the Aurora viewing lodge again…and waited…and waited…until at 0200, we called it a night (after NO aurora activity at all) and started snowshoeing back to the lodge (just 1/2 mile away). I thought I could see just a faint green glow, so had my companions stop while I set up my tripod and took a few pictures.

That was it. Our Northern Lights experience. We were already discussing how/when we might try another trip (to AK? Finland? Iceland?). We’ll keep you posted.