A Small North Star

Just off the Steese Highway, on traditional Athabascan land twenty miles outside of Fairbanks, Alaska, lies Skiland, home of America’s northernmost chairlift. You park at the top, click into your bindings, and, with a sweeping view over the rolling hills of the Interior, launch yourself down about a thousand vertical feet to the bottom of the hill. The chairlift ride back up takes fifteen minutes or so.

There used to be a tiny ski resort one hill over but the owners didn’t want people to eat their packed lunches in the lodge, so the people took matters into their own hands and in 1962 set up a new rope tow: Skiland was born. It was soon adopted by the generation that came to Fairbanks with the Trans-Alaska pipeline and never left. In 1990, the rope tow was replaced by an old double chair imported from BC’s SilverStar. Glades were cut, alder was cleared, benches were built around firepits hidden among the stunted spruce.

These days you can still eat whatever you want in the Skiland