Fairbanks

Athabascan peoples have lived on and travelled through the land around Fairbanks for thousands of years. A camp about 3,500 years old has been excavated on the grounds of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and sites on nearby Fort Wainwright date back more than 10,000 years; arrowheads from the university site resemble finds in Asia and were among the early evidence that people reached North America over the Bering land bridge.

In August 1901 the trader E. T. Barnette was set down with his supplies on the south bank of the Chena River, some seven miles above its meeting with the Tanana, and built a trading post. Smoke from his steamer caught the attention of the prospector Felix Pedro in the hills to the north, and Pedro's gold discovery set off the Fairbanks gold rush. Residents voted to incorporate the city in November 1903, with Barnette as its first mayor. By the First World War the population had collapsed, but it recovered in the Depression as the price of gold rose and large dredges such as Goldstream Dredge No. 8 worked the creeks.

The building of Ladd Field from the late 1930s, renamed Fort Wainwright in 1960, brought a wartime and Cold War boom. On 14 August 1967 the Chena burst its banks after record rain and flooded almost the whole town overnight; the Moose Creek Dam and a spillway were later built upstream to divert floodwater into the Tanana. After oil was found at Prudhoe Bay in 1968, Fairbanks became a supply point for the oil field and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and the Elliott Highway leads north from the city to the start of the Dalton Highway.

Fairbanks's culture is shaped by the interior's extremes. Athabascan and other Alaska Native leaders have long been influential here, and the city hosts the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics each July, four days of traditional games and survival skills from across the Circumpolar North. The Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitors Center downtown is named after an Alaska Native leader who headed Doyon, the Native regional corporation for the interior.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks, founded in 1917 and opened in 1922, is the flagship campus of the state university system and a centre of Arctic research, and it gives the west side a student town feel. Its Nanooks ice hockey team plays at the Carlson Center, and the junior Fairbanks Ice Dogs at the Big Dipper Ice Arena. Dog mushing is woven into local life: Fairbanks is a home of the Yukon Quest, a 1,000-mile sled dog race regarded as one of the hardest in the world, and teams train on the trails around town.

The seasons set the calendar. In June the Midnight Sun Game, first played in 1906, runs late into the solstice night without artificial light, and July brings the Golden Days celebration of the gold rush. In late winter the World Ice Art Championships draw sculptors from around the world, and through the dark months the aurora, visible on more than 200 nights a year in the area, is part of ordinary life.

The 2020 census counted 32,515 people in the city of Fairbanks and 95,655 in the Fairbanks North Star Borough, the second largest metropolitan area in Alaska after Anchorage. Many residents live outside the city limits — in College around the university, in North Pole to the south-east and out towards Ester.

The economy rests on the military, the university and government, with tourism and the oil industry's supply routes north adding to it. Fort Wainwright lies within the city, and the university enrolled around 7,500 students in autumn 2024.

Daily life follows the extremes of light and temperature. Summer days are long and busy, with gardening, river trips on the Chena and evening sport in full daylight. In winter the sun shines for only a few hours and in a cold snap the city can disappear under ice fog. Fairbanks is the coldest city of its size in the United States, although its mean annual temperature rose by 3.9°F between 1949 and 2018.

Fairbanks eats much like the rest of Alaska, with wild fish and game at the centre. Salmon is eaten fresh, smoked or dried, and it is served at the salmon bake in Pioneer Park. Many menus offer reindeer or bison alongside more familiar American food.

Sourdough has a special place in the interior: old-timers are still called sourdoughs, after the starter that prospectors carried into Alaska during the Klondike gold rush for baking bread, when yeast and baking soda were unreliable. Wild berries are picked in late summer, and the university's botanical garden researches the cultivation of Alaska's wild blueberries and lingonberries.

The Tanana Valley was an important farming area for Alaska in the early years of settlement, and agriculture continues today, mostly south-east of the city around Salcha and Delta Junction.

The city also has a range of Asian restaurants and a small craft brewing scene, and the Tanana Valley State Fair in late July and early August fills its grounds with food stands.