NYT -- An Alaskan Hot Spot, Even at 50 Below Zero.
March 4, 2002
An Alaskan Hot Spot, Even at 50 Below Zero
By SAM HOWE VERHOVEK
CHENA HOT SPRINGS, Alaska, Feb. 28 —
Haruna and Taketoshi Harada thought about
honeymooning in Paris. They considered
Hawaii. But in the end, they journeyed here, to a frigid
mountaintop near the Arctic Circle in Alaska, where
they nuzzled at 2 o'clock the other morning while
gazing at the starry dome of the sky. They were not
disappointed.
"It's like a curtain of colors, dancing across the sky,"
Mr. Harada said of the northern lights. "Very vibrant,"
Mrs. Harada said. "Very beautiful."
That same elation struck several other visitors to the
mountain, 60 miles east of Fairbanks, despite temperatures well below zero. Kazuhiro Omura, a young medical
student from Tokyo, was so happy when the ghostly green lights suddenly appeared and danced above him that he
rolled in the snow, laughing. Then he lay on his back and watched the show, proclaiming in Japanese how beautiful
it was.
Having long marketed itself as a prime destination for summer tourists, Alaska has been surprisingly successful in
recent years luring vacationers in winter as well, many of them from Japan, where the aurora borealis seems to
exert an almost mystical pull and where many newlyweds consider a viewing of the lights to be the height of
romance and an auspicious sign for a marriage.
The area in and around Fairbanks is recognized as one of the best places on earth
to see the shimmering lights. With a variety of other winter activities, including
dog-mushing schools and the annual World Ice Art Championships, which begins
on Tuesday in Fairbanks, the city has billed itself as a must-see at this time of
year, despite the often biting cold.
"Our line on that is, `Yes, but it's a dry cold,' " said Karen Lundquist,
communications manager for the Fairbanks Convention and Visitors Bureau. "But
it is cold. It's hard, when it's 50 below, to say that it's not cold. I don't know
how you get around that."
Actually, despite Fairbanks's slogan — "Winter: Always Guaranteed!" — Alaska
has been subject to the same moderation of normal temperatures that much of the
Northeast has experienced this year. Night temperatures here in recent weeks
have reached a positively balmy zero degrees.
Many Alaskans are not celebrating: they like it as cold as possible in the winter,
and increasing temperatures have set off a wave of alarm about rising sea levels
that could threaten coastal villages and thawing in the permafrost that could
wreak havoc with roads and even huge structures like the trans-Alaska pipeline.
For now, though, the visitors are coming, and no place is more popular with
Japanese tourists than Chena Hot Springs, a remote old lodge reachable on a
paved road from Fairbanks.
For the Japanese in particular, the Alaskan wilderness seems to offer a temporary
escape pod.
"I love Tokyo, but in Tokyo you cannot feel nature, there are so many artificial
things," said Mr. Omura, 22, who traveled here during his winter break with two
fellow students from Jikei University, Kentaro Yamakawa and Eriko Kamada, and
spent each of the last five nights searching the night skies for the northern lights.
Miss Kamada said, "Here, it is just so silent."
Despite the downturn in the Japanese economy, bookings are strong at the Chena Hot Springs Resort, with about
3,500 Japanese expected to visit this winter, said Joe Juszkiewicz, the general manager, who has hired three
Japanese-speaking guides, as well as a dog-mushing instructor and marketing director who are also fluent in the
language. Alaska can be reached relatively cheaply via a Korean Air Lines flight through Seoul that connects to
Anchorage.
At the resort, February and March are actually considered the "high season," even busier than July and August,
although that is still highly unusual for any tourism-related concern in Alaska. Certainly, the number of summer
vacationers here, which the state's Department of Community and Economic Development estimates to be about
900,000, dwarfs the winter counterparts.
Yet the number of winter travelers who describe "vacation and pleasure" as their primary reason for coming has
more than doubled in the state's surveys over the last decade, to 45,000 in 2000-2001 from 21,800 in 1990.
State tourism officials and resorts have advertised intensively in Japan. The state has also sponsored an advertising
campaign in the Southwest United States for an "Alaska Winter White Sale," although officials concede that their
mission can be a tough sell.
One major draw is the sled dog racing, including the Yukon Quest and the Iditarod. Another, of course, is the
northern lights, though Alaska competes with Canada, Greenland and Norway to entice visitors to come see them.
The aurora, ribbons of moving, bright lights caused by charged solar particles that congregate through magnetic pull
toward the earth's poles, is not a sure thing on any given night. Cloudy skies can obscure it for days on end. But in
late February and March here, the odds are pretty good for a spectacular display.
That happened here this evening, sending a dozen or so tourists charging out of a snow machine that brought them
to a ridge high above Chena Hot Springs.
Some couples wandered off to be alone. Masaaki Tsuruoka, an air- conditioning engineer from Tokyo, quickly went
to work with his camera. A few tourists quickly made for a heated yurt and fortified themselves with hot cider and
ramen noodles. The three medical students from Tokyo just lay on the snow, looking up.
"It is an amazing thing," said Kentaro Yamakawa, 23. "Beautiful. Mysterious. I don't want it to stop."
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company |
