The Alaskan Interior

The Alaskan interior includes Fairbanks, (the urban center of the Interior and Alaska's second-largest city). Other towns include North Pole just southeast of Fairbanks, Eagle, Tok, Glenallen, Delta Junction Nenana, Anderson, Healy and Cantwell. Most of us have heard of at least one of these towns.

The Alaskan interior also known as the Tanana Valley, includes dozens of tiny villages. Warbelow's Air serves 22 villages: Allakaket, Anaktuvuk, Beaver, Bettles, Central, Chalkyitsik, Circle, Fort Yukon, Galena, Hughes, Huslia, Kaltag, Koyukuk, Manly Hot Springs, Minto, Nulato, Rampart, Ruby, Stevens Village, Tanana and Venetie. They are located along the Yukon, Koyukuk and Tanana rivers.

Fuel, construction materials and supplies are shipped from Anchorage to Nenana by railroad, and then transported to Yukon River villages by barge in the summer. Many supplies are delivered by air, year-round.

Most Interior Alaska residents on the road systems have utilities. About half of the interior village homes have no water or waste water facilities.

The Interior covers about 167,644 square miles, and contains over 37 percent of Alaska’s land mass. In Fairbanks Alaska Natives make up about 9% of the population. In rural areas, the percentage increases to about 73%.The vast majority of indigenous Native people of Interior Alaska are Athabascan Indians.

Interior temperatures can be as cold as 65 degrees F below zero in winter, and as warm as 95 degrees F in the summer. The average temperature is 10 degrees below zero in January and 65 degrees in July.

Summer daylight lasts 21 hours; December nights are 21 hours long. Normal annual precipitation is 11.67 inches, with an annual average snowfall of 50 inches. When temperatures drop below 20 degrees, the wind is calm.

Fairbanks is the transportation hub for Interior Alaska. Jet service is available in Fairbanks with daily flights to Seattle, Anchorage and other Alaskan communities. Most communities (the villages) are accessible only by air, by boat during the summer, and by dogsled or snow machine in the winter.

Travel by any means is simply not practical in extreme weather. Airplanes stop flying at -45 degrees or colder. There can be days or weeks during the winter when airplanes are grounded and villages are cut off completely.

Agriculture, mining (mostly gold), tourism, fish and game are the major natural resources of the Interior.

Residents of rural Alaska (the villages) rely heavily on subsistence hunting, fishing and trapping. Wage, salary, and employment is limited in the villages. The photo you see above is a fishing village at Fort Yukon, on the Yukon River.

The Fairbanks economy also benefits from four military bases: Fort Wainwright, Eielson Air Force Base, Fort Greely and Clear Air Force Station.