Chena Hot Springs

For the next couple of days we hung around Fairbanks just taking it easy.  On Sunday we drove outside of town to Chena Hot Spring based on a friend’s recommendation.  Chena Hot Springs is located about 50 miles northeast of Fairbanks at the end of a lonely road.  The main attraction of this resort is that it has an outdoor hot springs that you can bathe/swim/relax in.  The place is actually a resort but it wasn’t exactly fancy.  It reminded us of a stay we made several years back in the Poconos west of NYC.  Chena, like the Poconos, or at least what we experienced in the Poconos, seemed like it was trying to hold on to the glory it had back in 1973.  Everything at Chena seemed dated and overpriced.  We were kind of expecting it to be a little more crowded than it was being that it was a Sunday and winter was starting to set in.  Who wouldn’t want to get away for the cold weekend and relax in a natural hot springs?   There were probably no more than 40 cars in the parking lot.  But then we remembered: we are outside of Fairbanks, AK, a “city” of only 30,000 or so.  The 40 cars that were there may have been a busy day for them.  We did not go into the water, instead we let Chris’s mom and dad go in the water but we did check out their “cooler” attraction which was an ice hotel and museum.  We did not know ahead of time that there was an ice hotel there, had we known we may have stayed over.  There were only four rooms inside the hotel portion, none were being used, but they did let us go inside and check them out.  Besides the 4 rooms there were many ice carvings and a good sized bar where they served us apple martinis in martini glasses made from ice.  They had some kind of furs on the bar stools which kept us from freezing while we drank our martinis.  We don’t know if it was the novelty of drinking them in an ice bar or not but the martinis were actually pretty good.  What really made the ice museum unique is that it is open all year.  They keep it a cool 25 degrees all the time so if you wanted to stay in an ice hotel in the middle of the summer you could.

From the outside

One of the rooms you can stay in

Another room

Room decor

More room decor

Entrance to a room

Appletini

The ice bar

Another view of the ice bar.  Note the chandelier that changes colors like the northern lights.

Ice carvers workshop

After having our drinks we went on a geothermal energy tour of the facility.  The resort uses the hot springs to make all of their energy and they also took us on a tour of their greenhouses where they grow a lot of the food that they serve in their restaurants and to their employees.  We also searched for a couple of geocaches on the property and in doing so we stumbled across a small plane that had crashed in the woods.  We thought seeing a plane in the woods was pretty cool (the pilot and passengers probably wouldn’t agree).  We later learned that the plane crashed in 1999 and the only person on board, the pilot, walked away from the crash.