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Museums show what the Interior's all about

UAF, Pioneer Park, Interior towns honor the past

By Leon Unruh / Alaska.com

The renovated museum covers both history -- from the mummified 36,000-year-old steppe bison to the Alaska Highway and trans-Alaska pipeline -- and from prehistoric artifacts to current photography. Buses carry many people to the museum, on the campus in the northwest part of town, but there's plenty of room for cars as well.

Also on campus, with lots of well-tended paths, is the Georgeson Botanical Garden, where northern flowers and "work" plants are tested and improved.

Science-minded visitors can tour the Arctic Research Center and the Geophysical Institute (look for the satellite dish atop a top building), where everything from the aurora to earthquakes is measured and studied. (There's also a large-animal farm, home to musk oxen and caribou.)

UAF has Fairbanks' best spot for viewing Mount McKinley, at a turnout on Yukon Drive.

Downtown Fairbanks has the Community and Ice museums. A brochure laying out a walking tour of downtown and nearby streets is available at many locations.

Fairbanks moved many of its historic buildings to Pioneer Park, which sounds like a tourist trap but which is much better than that. (It recently was known as Alaskaland Pioneer Park.)

The old buildings, such as the Wickersham House Museum and the Pioneer Museum, are joined by the Pioneer Air Museum, a replicated mining district and the 237-foot S.S. Nenana, the largest sternwheeler built west of the Mississippi River and the world's second largest wooden vessel. A 30-gauge railroad offers a rim around the 44-acre park. (Juneau also has a museum house dedicated to the memory of Wickersham, who was instrumental in the formation of Alaska's judicial system, in creating Denali National Park and in getting the Alaska Railroad running.)

Nenana's depot, home of the Alaska Railroad Museum, recalls the struggle to build the Alaska Railroad between Fairbanks and Seward, as well as Athabascan culture and Native land claims. This town, an hour's drive south of Fairbanks on the Parks Highway, is at the junction of the Nenana and Tanana rivers and is the embarkation point for barges carrying goods to villages in the Tanana and Yukon watersheds.

In July 1923, President Warren G. Harding drove the ceremonial final spike at a spot across the Tanana River from town. (A railroad car at Fairbanks' Pioneer Park commemorates his visit.) St. Mark's Mission Church was moved to town from its upriver location at a Episcopal school for Native children. The log building is open at times to visitors.

Central, a gold-mining settlement 127 miles northeast of Fairbanks on the Steese Highway, has the Circle District Historical Society Museum. It's open daily in the afternoon and displays fossils, mining tools and photographs from the area's heyday.

At the end of the Taylor Highway sits Eagle, founded in 1897 on the Yukon River near the Canadian border. It is the home of Fort Egbert, founded in 1899 when the city was booming with the Fortymile Mining District and government. There are exhibits in six buildings dating from the late 1800s.