Alaska: Fairbanks – Riverboat Discovery

Hello from Alaska! By now, if you are a regular reader, you know I’m on vacation in Alaska. I’m on a land + cruise vacation with Princess Cruises and I must say that Alaska certainly is stunningly beautiful. I have a lot of sightseeing, food, and other travel related posts to go up over the next few weeks and I’m also taking videos so I can create a few travel videos when I get home.

Today, I’m going to tell you about my first full day in Alaska. I went on a 3 hour trip down (and back up) the Chena River in Fairbanks. Fairbanks, I learned is known as the “Golden Heart” of Alaska because it is geographically the heart of the state and back in the day, they struck gold in Fairbanks. Riverboat Discovery was a part-day excursion that was included in the land portion of the trip through Princess Cruises. We were picked up from the Fairbanks Princess Lodge in the morning and taken a few minutes down the road to Steamboat Landing. There we boarded the riverboat and went down the Chena. All the while, we learned all about the area and history of the river and took a ton of pictures. By the way, so many of the houses along the river were so pretty! We were let off at Chena Village, a replica of an Athabascan Village. Athabascans are a Native Alaskan/American tribe. The guides at the village were mostly teenagers on summer break who are of Athabascan (and some have Eskimo blood also!) heritage. It was really cool to learn about some of their culture and how they hunted and used the pelts to keep warm in the insanely cold Alaskan winters. In case you didn’t know, Alaska can easily get to -40 degrees fahrenheit in the winter. Yes, that’s a negative before the 40!

We also passed by and stopped on the river to see an Iditarod Dog Kennel. The young Alaskan Huskies were soooo cute! We watched them being trained and also saw a demonstration of how they work as a team and know where to go through verbal commands. If you follow me on Instagram you may have seen my short video of a team of dogs pulling an ATV. It was so incredible to see!

The riverboat cruise was relaxing, informative, and I got great pictures. I highly recommend going on it if you find yourself in the Fairbanks area!

After the riverboat cruise and lunch we headed down 2.5 hours away to Denali National Park where I spent the next two days. I will pick up with that on Tuesday! But let me leave you with these gorgeous views from where I stayed in Denali – the Denali Princess Wilderness Lodge.

I wasn’t lying when I said it’s gorgeous here! I’ll be back tomorrow with a short July 4th post and book review, but Tuesday will be another travel post.