Today the thing that draws the world to Fairbanks hangs in the sky. The city sits directly under the auroral oval, which makes it one of the best places on Earth to watch the northern lights — green and violet curtains rippling over the boreal forest on clear, cold nights. The same far-north position gives Fairbanks its other signature: a summer of nearly endless daylight, the Midnight Sun, balanced against winters that drop to forty and fifty below. People come now for the aurora, the ice-carving championships, the hot springs, and the road north toward Denali and the Arctic — the same Interior wilderness the stampeders crossed, seen from the warm side of the window.
What it brought was gold. On July 22, 1902, an Italian prospector named Felix Pedro — born Felice Pedroni — struck pay dirt in the creeks north of Barnette's post, and word raced through the North. Barnette sent his employee Jujiro Wada to carry the news to the miners of Dawson, and the stampede was on; by 1903 hundreds of prospectors had poured into the Tanana Valley and a town was rising on the Chena. Barnette had already chosen the name: at the urging of Judge James Wickersham, he called the place Fairbanks, after Charles W. Fairbanks, a powerful Indiana senator who would soon become vice president under Theodore Roosevelt. The senator never visited, but his name stuck to the gold camp for good.
Why People Visit Fairbanks
Visitors come to Fairbanks for the aurora — the city's spot under the auroral oval is hard to beat — and stay for the layered Interior story: gold dredges and frontier cabins, a northern university and big-sky wilderness in every direction. It is the gateway to Denali and the Arctic, with hot springs and ice art for the winter and the Midnight Sun for the summer. Equal parts gold-rush heritage and far-north spectacle, Fairbanks rewards anyone drawn to the heart of Alaska.
