Thursday, February 23 2017
Today we had some free time until 3:00pm, when our tour group would head out to Chena Hot Springs and and the Aurora Ice Museum. After much kicking and screaming, we decided to go to the gym for a workout while on vacation. After we got that out of our system we headed out to the Aurora Ice Museum which, as the name suggests, is made entirely out of ice.
The ice bar/museum was more extravagant than we imagined. It featured ice sculptures as high as ten feet and portrayed incredibly intricate scenes. Each of the sculptures are hand painted and maintained constantly by the artists. We were told that every day they spend about an hour just on maintenance of the current sculptures as they are slowly melting due to being touched and the body heat we give off when we all gather in the bar.
They even had a few igloo rooms cut out of the ice that had a bunch of normal room stuff except, you know, frozen.
After producing a full album on the frozen xylophone, we hit the ice bar for a well deserved respite.
After about an hour in the ice bar, we headed over to the neighboring Chena Hot Springs for a relaxing dip. The hot springs are around 104 degrees Fahrenheit and are heated entirely from geothermal heat. While it smelled a bit like sulfur, the hot spring was incredibly relaxing and we stayed in for a good hour.
We attempted to see the Northern Lights again tonight but it began to snow and really didn’t clear up at all. So, unfortunately, we packed it up and went back to our hotel.
Tomorrow we don’t have any planned activities and will probably explore the city of Fairbanks a little bit before packing up and leaving on our 6:00am flight on Saturday morning.
