Gold panning in Alaska and the Alaska pipeline

August 26, 2018

On Tuesday, July 3 in Fairbanks, Alaska the boys went with me to shop in the morning, while Ryan worked on a new blog post. The boys were in a bad mood, and everything in the Walmart we went to was just different enough from our Walmart at home to make it difficult to find things.

The wifi Ryan was using at Walmart was pretty slow, so he came to find us after a while and we finished the shopping. He was fascinated that walmart had a larger selection of guns, ammo and reloading equipment than some sports stores in Alberta have.

We rushed back to the campsite to unload everything, then ate our lunch on the way to the Alyeska Pipeline visitor centre. The info about the pipeline was pretty neat: how it had to all be above ground because of permafrost and how they cooled the supports for it and some of the steep mountains they went down with the pipe.

Then we went across the road to Gold Daughters, where we could learn to pan for gold.

I really enjoyed panning, but Ryan tired of it after an hour or 2-he would rather build a machine to do it. Shawn just took pans of dirt to the water and swished them until there was no dirt left: faairly sure he didn't understand what we were doing. Along with entry to Gold Daughters we were given a bag with guaranteed gold in it, but we found a decent amount off of the pile of dirt they had there which we were practicing on. The boys decided finally that they would just splash in the water, so they were pretty wet by the time we were done.

video of Julies gold at Gold Daughters Alaska

They had old mining equipment that we took a look through on site as well.

Next, we headed to the Antique auto museum. The boys would not settle down, so we finally split up so that we could each have one to keep an eye on, so that they didn't touch anything. The vehicles there were really cool so we decided to make a seperate post for them because there are so many photos. That will be the next blog post. The fountainhead auto museum had over 80 American made antique cars. The really neat thing is that all the cars there are historically significant, pre-World War II automobiles. All except 2 of its cars still run if i remember right and all except maybe 10 are restored to amazing shape. The collection includes:

a car with an 8 cycle motor, “alternative” vehicles from way back like early steam, electric and hybrid cars, the first American Midget racers and the first V16-powered engine, air cooled motors with incredible heat sinks, a car that ran an extra cylinder off the exhaust of the first 2, a car with a friction drive transmission, a steam car that could do 130mph in 1906, car that had the first accelerator pedal, a 1914 car whos engine set an endurance record by running at wide open throttle for 337hrs with no adjustments, a 1917 pierce arrow inline 6cyl engine that had 13.5L displacement-the rest of the car matches the motors size, the first molybdenum steel car, the very first car ever built in Alaska, the first front wheel drive car and on and on...

It was about 8 pm or so when we left there, but still very hot, so Ryan took us out for ice cream at a place called Hot Licks. The ice cream there is fairly expensive, but they make it right there, in several-gallon batches, and test out a lot of new flavours. They even had an almond lactose free one, for me. That place was hopping! This photo was of the people on one side of the building, there were more than this on the other side.