Chena Hot Springs

The drive out to Chena Hot Springs from Fairbanks takes you almost 100 kilometers up a road that gets progressively lonelier, black spruce forest closing in on both sides, the occasional moose standing unbothered in the ditch, until the road simply ends at a cluster of buildings steaming gently in the cold. I arrived in February at minus twenty-eight Celsius, changed as fast as humanly possible, and walked out to the outdoor rock lake feeling like I was making a serious mistake right up until I lowered myself into water heated naturally to nearly 40 degrees by the geothermal spring beneath it.

Floating there with only my head above the water, hair instantly freezing into stiff strands the moment it left the surface, I watched a faint green curtain of aurora build slowly overhead, gain intensity, and eventually ripple directly above the steam rising off the pool. It is, without exaggeration, one of the most purely enjoyable physical sensations I’ve experienced anywhere — the water genuinely hot, the air genuinely brutal, and the sky doing something no photograph quite captures.

The resort itself runs on its own geothermal power plant, one of the few in the world operating at such a relatively low resource temperature, and the on-site engineer gave tours explaining the binary cycle system with evident pride in a piece of applied science most guests never think to ask about. Chena is also home to an ice museum kept below freezing year-round by its own refrigeration system, filled with ice sculptures and an actual bar carved from ice that serves appletinis in ice glasses, which sounds gimmicky and is, and I enjoyed it anyway.

When to go: Mid-August through mid-April for aurora viewing, with the darkest, clearest skies typically in September and March. Winter is by far the more atmospheric season, though summer offers hiking, the same hot springs without the aurora, and none of the cold-weather logistics.