Well well we meet again! So rather than taking the 30 minute flight, I decided to take out the rambler and drive my way up the last frontier to the golden heart city... FAIRBANKS. Yep, with enough money to live on enough Hostess apple and lemon pies along with a shelter to stay in (my brothers summer dorm at the university), the trip was well worth the 6 hour drive. Did I learn anything new? Why yes I did! As my brother best put it, "Fairbanks is the 1980's version of Anchorage". The ciggerette smoking, confederate flag waving, and... long male hair truley lived up to my expectations.

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A statue honoring the Italian explorer who couldn't find any gold and thus landed here to rest in frustration.
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UAF --one of the few locations of the controls to the Mars rover.
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Dillingers has real good cornbeef
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My brother in the 3E car. No its not a cheesy tribute to Dale Earnhardt, rather it was ment to be No.33 until a crew member realized my brother was painting the first 3 the wrong direction on the roof of the car
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Johanson Expressway
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On the way home, I couldn't resist but take this shot at the tallest point in North America.. Mt. Denali :)
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Great fairbanks photo tour!, wow the sky looks very smokey! I like the huge Mt. Denali :) My roommate was in Fairbanks just that weekend Sat 20th and Sunday 21st, to visit a online friend. He said he enjoyed it when I talked to him online on his laptop.

Incredible. Fairbanks seems like an ecological nightmare of a place, something so hideous and yet fascinating that it suggests mankind's future through a misty lens.

fairbanks looks like a very nice city. why is the sky so murky? surely it isn't humidity. i also noticed a lack of trees. there were a couple in your pictures, but not many. is it too pointless to plant trees up there, because of the short warm season? lastly, how much snow does fairbanks get in a year? where do they put all of it? to they truck it out to some desolate location?

fairbanks looks like a very nice city. why is the sky so murky? surely it isn't humidity. i also noticed a lack of trees. there were a couple in your pictures, but not many. is it too pointless to plant trees up there, because of the short warm season? lastly, how much snow does fairbanks get in a year? where do they put all of it? to they truck it out to some desolate location?


i was thinking the same thing. the images look very smoky & gloomy.

but nonetheless, VERY nice city. i heard u guys get only four hours a day of daylight. lol.....i wouldn't be able to live with that at all.

thanks for the replies guys! I appreciate them!

When it comes to the trees, there are plenty surrounding Fairbanks. The problem however is that there is nothing worth taking a photo of around there. Just a couple of mansions and dirt roads. The urban core is what I found very fascinating. In Alaska, the tree's really don't stop until they reach the North Slope mountain range. From there on its just tundra up to the Arctic Ocean.

When it comes to snow, I don't know exactly how much they get, but just like my home in Anchorage, Alaska, the piles of snow usually get thrown to a snow dump. Our snowdumps of course reach the heights of lowrise office buildings and usually cause flooding problems to nearby streets during the spring thaw.

I was actually in Fairbanks last November and I can tell you, the city really gets no sun at all. All they really get is a very weak orange dot that rises from the south and sets in the south by 2:00pm. If you think these photos look gloomy (yes, its a nearby forest fire), you oughta see Fairbanks in the winter. Its seriously depressing.

ok here's a shot from the archives of November 2004

I remembered being able to come back to downtown to do some last minute photo taking while the airplane was delayed by more than an hour. So if memory serves me correct, this is at about midday around 1, 2pm.
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thats pretty awesome, my sister is getting married in a couple of days on the pedsterain bridge in your 2nd picture, nice fairbanks is cool i flew there by myself (im only 13) from roanoke va to fairbanks

ok here's a shot from the archives of November 2004

I remembered being able to come back to downtown to do some last minute photo taking while the airplane was delayed by more than an hour. So if memory serves me correct, this is at about midday around 1, 2pm.


not much snow for alaska. how exactly does the snow work up there? does it snow an inch or two every couple days, or does an occasional blizzard come through and dump feet of snow? what's the average amout of snow from one storm? what's the most amount of snow seen in one storm? how often does it snow?

when i was in maine in february 2001, there was so much snow, they didn't know what to do with it. every road had a 4 foot high ridge of snow where the shoulder is, and piles of snow from parking lots or major roads were stashed away in any nook or cranny available. there was about 1 foot of snow on the ground, and it all looked pretty fresh.

Some unique pictures.

Isn't Mount Mc. Kinley the highest point in North America?

I was actually in Fairbanks last November

yeah, i think i remeber you giving us a good photo tour back then too.

not much snow for alaska. how exactly does the snow work up there? does it snow an inch or two every couple days, or does an occasional blizzard come through and dump feet of snow? what's the average amout of snow from one storm? what's the most amount of snow seen in one storm? how often does it snow?

when i was in maine in february 2001, there was so much snow, they didn't know what to do with it. every road had a 4 foot high ridge of snow where the shoulder is, and piles of snow from parking lots or major roads were stashed away in any nook or cranny available. there was about 1 foot of snow on the ground, and it all looked pretty fresh.

Well we don't really get blizzards or 'snow storms' anymore. My half brothers and sisters (now in their 30's) remembered a time when Anchorage received its first snowfall in September. Now however, our first snow arrives usually at late November or atleast has been for the last 5, 10 years. When it comes to how often it snows, usually the flakes will come down about once every two weeks or so... its pretty dry all year with the exception of August and April up here (though as a kid, I thought I witnessed more frequent snowfalls back in the early 90's.. but who knows.. could be my imagination). If I were to estimate the total inches without counting the snow that melts, I'd say our total is around 6 inches.

March 2002 was the day Anchorage woke up to "28.6 Inches of Chaos" after the weatherman predicted the night before that we were gonna get "flurries"... The next morning shutted down the city and its public schools for up to two days (a real rarity).

If you want to see huge piles of snow on the mountains and high elevations, go to Washington state, Oregon or California. Alaska isn't famous for huge amounts of snowfall, but famous for COLD and tundra climate. Alaska do get freezing fog time to time in the winter when everything freezes over when fog touches everything, and visibilities to zero.

It looks like a nuclear wasteland. Too gray.

wild stuff...........

Whoa. I find this oddly very very fascinating. I don't really get to see much Alaska. I usually hafta make up a lot of stuff. haha Thanks for the look into Fairbanks!