Today is a beautiful day in Fairbanks, sunny skies with a little smoke from distant forest fires and the temperature around 75 degrees Farenheit. Fairbanks is celebrating its annual Golden Days, commemorating the founding of the city. Today was the annual parade (held since 1952) and we decided to attend it. Our pictures represent just a small sample of the parade participants.

In the afternoon, we boarded the stern wheeler Discovery III for a cruise on the Chena and Tanana Rivers. The Chena River flows through downtown Fairbanks and is a tributary of the Tanana. The Tanana River is one of the major tributaries of the Yukon River. The cruise took us down the Chena to its meeting with the Tanana and then a few miles down the Tanana before turning around. The Chena riverfront properties are among the most best in Fairbanks and we saw some great homes. During the cruise the boat pulled up along the banks at Susan Butcher (first women to win the Iditarod race) and husband, Dave Monson's sled dog training facility, a fish camp and an Athabascan village recreation.

The Parade
We called this the first Alaskan motor home. This vehicle, a 1928 Model T Ford has participated in every parade since the first in 1952. The driver is 85.
Miner with his transportation
Fairbanks teachers, one of them is a man
Susie's favorite float. Everything in Alaska is large... imagine the bathtub this duck normally floats in.
Elvis is alive and living in Fairbanks... by the way, he is an Indian

Stern Wheeler Discovery III Cruise
Discovery dock and smaller sister ship. The dock is made out of leftover Alaska Pipeline pipe sections and also serves as a dry dock for maintenance of the three stern wheelers.
Float plane taking off on the Chena River, next to the Discovery. With hundreds of rivers and streams and a million lakes, this is a common, sometime the only, means of transportation.
A two airplane family on the Chena River
The confluence of the Chena River, running clear at left, and the silt loaded Tanana. The local name for this contact between the two waters is "The Wedding of the Waters."
Dogs being readied for a training run around the lake. They are connected to a wheeled sled when there is no snow. Click on picture for video.
A typical fish camp... Alaskan natives would spend weeks during the summer at a fish camp catching and preserving fish for the winter. At left is the fish wheel which scoops up passing salmon into a box. On shore, from right to left, is the temporary family home, the smoke house, a drying rack and the cache for storing the smoked, dried fish.
Athabascan village recreation as seen from the Discovery
A typical log cabin made from spruce logs.
The roof is covered in spruce boards and sod.
A cache with some of the furs trapped by the native people. The furs displayed are wolf, lynx, wolverine, silver and red fox, beaver, muskrat, ermine and mink.
A trappers line cabin. These were built about a day's journey apart and were large enough for a stove, a bed and supplies.
Cabbage growing in the Athabascan village. The head of this one measures about 12 inches across and still has more than a month of growing left. They grow some very large vegetables in Alaska.
Reindeer at the Athabascan village. The difference between reindeer and caribou is that the reindeer have been domesticated.