Aurora Capital of North America — Fairbanks sits under the auroral oval 240 nights a year, the Midnight Sun never sets from late May to late July, and the Chena River hot springs warm you after watching the northern lights from an ice sculpture that visitors carved themselves
Fairbanks is Alaska's second city and the interior hub of the largest state in the United States — a subarctic city on the Chena River at 64°N where the extremes of the natural world are part of daily life: temperatures swing from -50°C in January to +35°C in July, the sun doesn't set from mid-May to late July ('Midnight Sun'), and the aurora borealis is visible on clear nights from September through March. The Aurora Borealis Observatory at Chena Hot Springs (60 km east) is one of the world's premier aurora viewing sites, with glass-domed viewing rooms and ice hotel rooms for overnight auror…
Felix Pedro, an Italian-born prospector, discovered gold in a creek north of present-day Fairbanks in July 1902 — triggering a gold rush that founded the city within months. Captain E.T. Barnette had been left stranded on the Chena River by a steamboat captain and turned his trading post into the supply hub for the new gold fields. The Alaska Railroad reached Fairbanks in 1923, connecting it to Anchorage and the port of Seward. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline (1977) passes through Fairbanks on its 1,300 km run from Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean to Valdez on Prince William Sound — the pipeline's 1…