Day 13, Thursday, July 21st. Fairbanks

Waking up I see the rain has followed me from Canada, it’s cool here too, about 15 degree below normal, the road to Fairbanks is well paved, forest switches back and forth from mostly black spruce in boggy areas to Birch and Elm in dry areas and in between white spruce, you can recognize them as tall pointed pines with many branches.  There seems to some logging of the white spruce trees along the way.  They do the same thing in Canada, leave about 20 feet of forest by the road way and clear everything behind.

Rivers are very different here; in the NT they were fast, big water confined to a narrow space. Yukon, rivers tended to be very wide and deep.  Here they are like flood plains without water.  However in Fairbanks I here on the radio that there is flooding everywhere, but is seems in the river.

I drive around Fairbanks for about ½ hour trying to figure out where the main drag is, turns out there isn’t one. I’m told the best show is the University Museum and given that it’s raining that’s where I go, spent almost 5 hours there, seeing everything, watching 2 movies one really good one on the  Aurora Borealis and using the Wi-Fi.  

There was one thing I was really shocked to see.  In the 1970’s in Canada the northern native tribes expressed that they no longer wanted to be called Eskimo meaning flesh or raw meat eaters but rather Inuit meaning people of the north.  They felt that Eskimo was derogatory.  Our government agreed and during the next 15 years removed/replaced the words in every textbook and public space.  However here, at the University, it’s everywhere. They even had a description where they say the two local tribes do not like being called Eskimo and still they ignore their wishes and call them Eskimo, I wrote a comment in their guest book. 

 I managed to meet a few natives while there and it was mixed. Two said they really did not mined as the liked raw meat the third did not like it at all, did not feel Inuit fit because Canadian’s already had that term.

I made the car washing mistake again, the rain got rid of a lot of the dirt but I really wanted it gone. In order the clean the wheels I spent 2 hours taking all four wheels off, scraping the rims with my spatula and noted the FR tire no longer had balancing weights on it.  I’ll see tomorrow if it’s out of balance, when driving at higher speeds. 

 I drove 421km’s today.