It’s only about a hundred miles from Tok to Delta Junction, the official end of the Alaska highway, so it took less than two hours to get there. There’s a marker there for the end of the highway as well as a visitors center with displays on Alaskan wildlife and the opportunity to purchase a certificate that certify completion of the Alaska Highway. There’s also a roadhouse museum across the street along with a display of construction equipment from the building of the highway in 1942.
In Delta Junction the ALaska Highway meets up with the Richardson Highway from Valdez and continues as the Richardson Alaska Highway another hundred miles or so to Fairbanks. It’s a pretty easy drive, fairly straight roads in pretty good shape most of the way. We passed Eielson Air Force Base on the way to Fairbanks and then went through North Pole, a town noted for it Christmas-themed attractions. We spent a couple of nights in Fairbanks at the KOA in North Pole, on the banks of the Chena River.
Fairbanks is the second-largest city in Alaska with nearly 100,000 people living in it’s metro area. It’s a bustling town with everything you might need – grocery stores, including a Walmart Supercenter and Safeway plus Alaska’s Fred Meyer chain, Home Depot and many of the other stores you might encounter anywhere else in the US. It’s a good spot to re-supply before heading into some of the more remote areas.
We took a tour of the historic Gold Dredge #8, a floating gold mine that spent over 30 years digging up and separating gold nuggets from the dirt along a 4.5 mile stretch of the countryside, while we were in Fairbanks. We even got to pan for gold, recovering about $50 between the two of us. Nearby the dredge was a section of the Alyeska pipeline and the tour guide for the dredge gave a brief talk about that as well.
Check out our blog page for more on our Alaska trip.
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