We arrived in Fairbanks at eleven o'clock at night and the sun was still blazing. Not twilight, not a glow on the horizon — actual daylight, warm and golden, pouring across the parking lot of our hotel like it was three in the afternoon. Children were playing baseball in a field across the road. A woman walked her dog. Someone was mowing their lawn. I stood in the hotel doorway with my bag in my hand and laughed out loud, because my body said it was bedtime and the sky said otherwise. This is Fairbanks in June: 22 hours of functional daylight, a giddiness that infects everyone, and a collective understanding that sleep is for the dark months.

Our room had blackout curtains, but light seeped in around the edges like water finding cracks in a dam. I pulled a sleep mask over my eyes and lay there listening to the strange, bright silence of a city that refuses to go to bed. When I finally slept, I dreamed of sunshine.

The next morning we drove to Gold Dredge 8, a preserved mining operation from the 1928 gold rush era. The guide was a retired teacher named Harold who had lived in Fairbanks for forty years and still got excited talking about placer mining. He walked us through the massive dredge — a floating factory that once chewed through riverbed gravel to extract gold — and then handed us each a pan and pointed us toward the sluice. "The claims are seeded," he admitted with a grin, "but the technique is real. Swirl gently. Let the heavy stuff settle." I stood in cold water up to my shins, swirling black sand in a metal pan, and watched the lighter material wash away. There, glinting against the dark bottom — actual gold. Tiny flakes, worth maybe two dollars, but the thrill that shot through me was electric. This is what drew a hundred thousand dreamers north in 1898. Most found hardship. A few found fortunes. All found the same cold water I was standing in.

That afternoon we boarded the Chena River sternwheeler, a flat-bottomed riverboat that chugs along the Chena River through the heart of Fairbanks. The narration covered the city's Gold Rush founding, the Athabascan fish camps that lined the river for centuries before, and the 1967 flood that nearly destroyed downtown. We passed a working fish wheel — an ancient indigenous technology that uses river current to scoop salmon into a holding box — and watched a bush pilot demonstrate floatplane takeoffs and landings on a riverside strip. My wife's hand squeezed mine when the pilot lifted off, the pontoons leaving a perfect V of spray across the green water. She whispered, "That's freedom." And for a moment, it was.

But the moment I carry from Fairbanks happened later, at the University of Alaska Museum of the North. The building itself is striking — white curves that suggest snowdrifts and Arctic ice — but inside, in a quiet corner of the natural history gallery, I found Blue Babe. He is a 36,000-year-old steppe bison, preserved in permafrost, pulled from the frozen ground near Fairbanks in 1979. His skin still has the blue mineral stain that gave him his name. I stood there looking at an animal that had walked this same ground when woolly mammoths grazed beside him, and something shifted in my understanding of time. Thirty-six thousand years. The Gold Rush was yesterday. Our cruise was this morning. Blue Babe made all of human history feel like a footnote, and I walked out of that museum humbled in a way I hadn't expected from a city I'd planned as a transit stop.

That evening we ate salmon at a restaurant along the Chena River while the sun circled the sky without setting. The cook told us the salmon was Copper River sockeye, flown in from Cordova, and it tasted of cold rivers and clean fat. A man at the next table was explaining to his wife that in December this same sky would be dark for twenty hours, and the northern lights would ripple overhead like green curtains. "You should come back," he said. She smiled and said, "Maybe we will." I understood then that Fairbanks is a city of seasons, and we had only seen one face of it. The midnight sun was glorious, but I found myself wanting the other Fairbanks — the dark one, the cold one, the one where aurora paints the sky. I realized that some places ask you to return, not because you missed something, but because there is always more to see.

The pros: the midnight sun is genuinely magical and creates a festival atmosphere that's infectious. Gold Dredge 8 is surprisingly fun and historically rich. The Museum of the North is excellent and uncrowded. The sternwheeler cruise gives a relaxed, narrated introduction to the city. And Fairbanks has an authentic frontier character that cruise ports lack — this is a working northern city, not a tourist stage.

The cons: Fairbanks is far from your ship, and the transit adds cost and time to your cruise vacation. Summer visitors miss the northern lights entirely — there is simply too much daylight. Mosquitoes in June and July can be fierce; bring repellent with DEET. The city itself is spread out and not especially walkable, so you'll need transportation between attractions. Lodges and restaurants near the cruisetour hotels are adequate but not memorable. Some cruise visitors feel that Fairbanks adds a day they would rather spend in Denali.

Practical tips: embrace the midnight sun rather than fighting it. Bring a good sleep mask and let your body adjust. Book Gold Dredge 8 through your cruisetour package or independently for $40-50 per person. The Museum of the North costs $18 and deserves at least two hours. If you have two nights, add a Chena Hot Springs day trip ($150-200 including transport) for geothermal pools and, in winter, prime aurora viewing. And pack layers — even in summer, Fairbanks temperatures can swing from 75°F in the afternoon to 45°F overnight.