15 June 2014 Made it to Fairbanks!

The journey north was not a very tough one, a couple of flights and one day's time to make it from Denver to Fairbanks is not too bad. I can only imagine the trek during the early gold mining and frontier days when Alaska was settled would yield a very different journey.

I was able to spend some time in Seattle on my layover with a good friend from high school (hey Afton!) and grab some lunch before heading back to the airport and meeting up with Regina, another PolarTREC teacher. Regina and I flew from Seattle to Fairbanks and met up with Byron (my researcher) and Sarah (his graduate student) and loaded up our monstrous duffels into a rather large pick-up.

We ran a few errands grabbing some snacks for the drive and a few other essentials before having a lovely dinner along the shores of the Chena River.

We checked into our "hotel" aka the dorms of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks and settled in. It is still quite light outside even though it is after 10:00pm, and that's only going to continue as we head even further north tomorrow.

I'm very excited to break into the Alaskan tundra and see some legendary scenery tomorrow along our drive. Oh and just for fun, the sun sets tonight at 12:43am, and rises at 3:00am (it won't ever get totally dark, just dusky).