Weather in Fairbanks was still prety dreary today, but at least most of the rain moved out so we were able to get a few things done.
One of those things I just figured we kinda of had to do while in Fairbanks was make a stop by the spot where you can see the Trans Alaska Pipeline. There’s a small turnout along one of the roads to the north-east of Fairbanks where you can get up close to the pipeline. There’s even a gift shop where they sell pipeline shirts that are only sold there.
From there we tried to work our way over to our next stop without taking the main roads. We kinda like to get off the main roads and explore the back ways a lot. This did turn up an unusual site in this case. As we’re driving along, all of a sudden just off the road we ran across an old airplane that had been partially dismantled. Not entirely sure what it was, maybe a DC-3 or something, but it was just there by the side of the road. Definitely not something I’m used to running across.
When looking through the various brochures we’d picked up, one thing we discovered was that we were just on the front edge of the peak time period for sandhill cranes to be migrating through. So we decided that we’d brave the occasional rain shower and try swinging by there. Turns out this wasn’t a bad choice, because there were indeed a large number of sandhill cranes hanging out in the field (along with lots of ducks). Viewing even from the areas near where you park were pretty good. In fact, we wandered one of the trails to see if we could get a better viewing, and on that day we actually just ended up further from most of the birds (although I’d bet on some days it’d be worthwhile). We even caught a couple of the cranes doing their dancing.
With our flight late in the day, we still had some time to kill, and with dreary weather and no real plans, we decided to take off down the road to where they had to build a special suspension bridge to take the pipeline over the Tenana river. Turns out it was a pretty scenic drive, often with viewpoints overlooking the Tenana River along the way. Also passes not too far from the runway at Eielson AFB, which is amusing, because there’s a long stretch of the road that has signs warning you not to stop or take pictures in the area. That’s kinda amusing, because while you can certainly see some of the planes from the road, quite frankly, you can really get more info from the Google Earth view of the place.
Finally it was back to the airport to turn in the rental care and wait for our flight out. Our flight from Fairbanks to Anchorage ended up being fairly late, and we barely made the next flight we were on.
All in all, a pretty good trip.