Holed Up at the Hot Springs

A few years later, I was back in Fairbanks. I took some photos from the plane on the way in, and they turned out rather well. Once we arrived, a trip to the supermarket gave us a fine example of what happens when you don’t dig your car out after it snows.

Our Fairbanks itinerary was unusually simple this time: mostly staying in the hotel and waiting for the northern lights.

On my previous visit, I had gone to a hot spring deep in the mountains, but only as a day trip. I hadn’t stayed overnight. We figured somewhere that remote ought to be good for watching the aurora, so this time we decided to stay. For two days, no less.

I found myself driving the same road to the hot springs again. Conditions were much better this time. At least it was snow. Whatever else I had forgotten about the previous drive, I remembered the road being all ice.

There was a small complication on the way. One of us received an email from a company they had interviewed with, suggesting a phone call sometime soon to discuss the interview and next steps. Then we drove into the mountains and lost cell service. They promptly started panicking.

We checked into the hot springs hotel and paid for its Wi-Fi. It turned out to be Wi-Fi in name only. Almost nothing would load. Web browsing was out of the question, though the email app on the phone barely managed to work, perhaps because it needed so little data.

With no cell signal and hardly any way to communicate, we considered driving back out of the mountains for the call, then returning. We eventually abandoned that idea. It was too much trouble, and the email hadn’t said the call needed to happen right away.

We all knew that a day or two wouldn’t matter. Companies themselves could take a week or two to get back to you without thinking twice. But being the one waiting for an interview result is another matter. Then we discovered a landline in the laundry room that could receive calls. So they emailed the company that number and asked to be called there if needed.

That afternoon, we sat beside the phone for more than two hours. Naturally, it never rang.

The grand resolution came two days later, after we left the mountains. One follow-up call, and it was all sorted out with no trouble at all. There had been absolutely no need to get so worked up.

Anyway, back to the hot springs hotel.

We had poor luck during those two days. The aurora was so faint it was barely visible to the naked eye. I also found that the hotel itself wasn’t actually a great place to watch it, because there were lights on at night. The hotel did its best, switching off as many of the big outdoor lights as possible. But some had to stay on for guests’ safety, and even those were too bright. To see the aurora properly, we would have had to head farther into the dark wilderness. In that case, what had we come here for?

We didn’t get much aurora, but we certainly got our fill of the hot springs. With no cell service and essentially no Wi-Fi, what else were we going to do? It was also properly cold, with nighttime temperatures around −40°C.

So we played around in the water. At −40°C, hot spring water poured over your head quickly cools and freezes. With only your head above the water, the air around your hair is cold enough to keep the ice from melting, leaving it sticking up in every direction. The result: we all turned into Super Saiyans. A very satisfying transformation.

During those two days, the hotel’s eaves showed us why sheltering under a roof in a freezing northern winter doesn’t lead to a sweet romance. The icicles get you before love does.

One of those drops. Game over.

In the end, we never got a proper view of the aurora there. Throughout the trip, it was about as faint as the aurora I had seen a few years earlier. A bit disappointing.