The weather pretty much cooperated today, so I took advantage and did some sight-seeing. About 10 miles north of Fairbanks, you can go to a visitor's center for the Alaska Pipeline. It's pretty interesting and you can get up and personal with the pipe. You can actually hear the oil passing thru the pipe.
You can see the little visitor's center behind the pipe itself.
I thought this was also interesting, although they didn't explain how they got the "Pig" out of the pipe and back upstream:
After seeing the Pigs and the Pipes, I went to the Fountainhead Antique Automobile Museum in Fairbanks. This collection is owned entirely by one man, a local real estate developer, and it has to rival the best auto museums I've ever seen. There are some 75 cars in the collection, all but a handful that actually run and are "exercised" on a regular basis, and five of the autos are "sole-survivors". The museum isn't huge, but it is well laid out with a lot of ancillary displays of old photo's of the towns in Alaska and information on auto pioneers of the first half of the century in Alaska. Most of the collection consists of "Brass-Era" cars, which I think generally means pre-1920 or so, but there are a number of other examples up through the mid 1930's but nothing beyond that. The museum is immaculate and the cars (runnable!) are equally immaculate. I had a hard time capturing the collection in a photo, but take a look at these:
And don't forget, these all run!
After spending a couple hours at the museum, I headed west toward Denali National Park just to take in the scenery. As you might imaging, it was pretty spectacular:
This was about 20 miles outside Fairbanks on top of a hilltop and overlooks the Tanana River Valley. If you look close on the horizon, you can see smoke from a number of forest fires in the Willow Creek area. Fires are a big problem up here because, as I've been told more than once, this area is an "Arctic Desert." (Couldn't prove it by me...it just keeps raining). Well, anyway, once the fire gets started, it can get knocked down by rain or firefighters, only to rekindle itself once conditions dry out because it has been smoldering underground. On the way in Friday, I passed huge swathes of land that had been burned over.
Well, tomorrow it's up the the Arctic Circle and then Tuesday down to Anchorage. Miles today: 69. Total: 5,037.
