Chena Hot Springs

We headed out toward Prudhoe bay Friday night but we weren’t fully committed to making it all the way up there. We had heard very mixed reviews about wether the trip was actually worthwhile, and there was reports of snow on the pass. Unfortunately as we started out the highway in that direction, the RV started to making a strange new noise. When pushing down past a certain point on the throttle, it sounded like the engine was over-revving, or that there was a lot of air rushing around. It was most notable when the engine shifted down a gear to try to pick up speed. The noise was strangely inconsistent and even went away entirely from time to time. We didn't want to risk being on the Dalton highway with this issue but we really didn’t want to go back to our Walmart in Fairbanks, so we decided to head up the Chena Hot Springs, only 50 miles from Fairbanks. 

One of our websites said that there was a free campsite up the road to the hotsprings but it must have been out of date. So we ended up driving all the way to the end of the road at the hotsprings and decided to splurge and pay for camping for the first time on our trip. It was $20 for a dry camp spot, which seemed like a lot but it was a nice place and we knew we wanted to spend the next day exploring the hot springs. 

The hot springs sell a day pass for $15 a person that lets you come and go as many times as you want. They also have showers :) We were going to get up at 6:45 to get in right when they opened but ended up staying in bed until 7:45. We were still some of the first people in pool and it was great. 

There is an indoor pool and two hot tubs that were basically shallow, hotel pool quality. Not great. But outside there was another hot tub we didn’t even look at, and a giant rock pool fed by the hot spring. It was mostly about 4-5 feet deep and fairly large. In one place there was a nice rain machine that sprinkled your upper body with cold water. In one corner there was a powerful jet of warm water that gave a great back massage. We stayed in for a couple a couple of hours before taking off to explore for the day. 

Chena had a million things to do, 95% of which you had to pay for. But there were mountain bike rentals, horse back riding, flight seeing, an ice museum, dog cart/sled rides (depending on the season), a so much more. We elected to not spend any more money and check out one of the many hiking trails. Kathleen will probably end up posting another post about all the plants on the hike because she was hard core geeking out. But it was a beautiful hike. A little muddy at times though… 

 

After our hike we really wanted to check out the dog kennels. They have tours of the kennels for $20 but there is also a visitor center so we were just going to go down and look around. It was cool, but the worker kinda ignored us, which felt a little weird. We both had a lot of questions and the visitor center really wasn’t set up to just be able to look around ourselves. But we did get to see the dogs and were surprised yet again by the wide variety.

There were signs posted all around the resort to ask about Aspen, the 10 year old sled dog who was looking for a new home. We were sorely tempted… We found him sitting on his dog house down at the kennels and were hoping that someone around the kennels would come talk to us about him but no one did. He looked like a sweet old guy, but it is probably better for Declan that we didn’t introduce another member into our family trip. Yet. 

After looking at the dogs we went back into the hot springs. Pounding down water the whole time. It was nice to get to shower off the mud and sweat from the hike and the hot water felt great on our tired bodies. 

We didn’t stay as long the second time because we got hungry and wanted to save our energy to come back one last time as it was finally getting dark, so we made dinner and took a nap. The hot springs are open until 11:45pm year round. We hadn’t actually seen darkness yet in Alaska because we are usually head to bed at around 10 and even though the sun has set it is far from dark. But we went back to the hot springs around 10 last night and enjoyed watching it get slowly darker. The hot springs were really nice as the air temperature outside started to plummet. There was tons of steam rising off of the pool and there were fun color changing lights shining into the steam for a party vibe. Even though it was the most crowded at night, it was also the most fun. We both agree that we want to try to come back to the hot springs when we come up to volunteer at the Yukon Quest in November. 

We treated yesterday as a sort of Honeymoon day, allowing ourselves to splurge on hot spring time, not thinking about driving or the weird noise that our RV is making (too much) and just being, which really is the hope of the trip. It was really really nice. We even opened the “Honeymoon” card from Kathleen’s Aunt Julie, thanks for your words of wisdom Aunt Julie. 

Now we are back at the Subway in our Walmart in Fairbanks using the internet. None of the car places are open again today because it’s Sunday and some googling leads us to believe that we have a vacuum hose issue which shouldn’t be too severe. On the drive back it acted up at first but stopped after the first 10 miles. We're thinking it may be worse when wet? We’re going to head down to Denali now and then hopefully get the RV looked at down in Anchorage.