Biohazard Cleanup Near Aurora Fairbanks, AK

Fairbanks is a home rule city and the borough seat of the Fairbanks North Star Borough, and Alaska's second most populous city, with 32,515 residents and 11,862 households in the 2020 census.

E. T. Barnette founded a trading post on the south bank of the Chena River in August 1901, and a nearby gold discovery sparked the Fairbanks Gold Rush; residents voted to incorporate the city in November 1903, and it was named for Senator Charles W. Fairbanks of Indiana, later the twenty-sixth vice president of the United States.

Fairbanks is the largest city in Alaska's Interior, lying 196 miles by road south of the Arctic Circle, and its metropolitan area of 95,655 people in 2020 is the northernmost metropolitan statistical area in the United States.

The city straddles the Chena River near its confluence with the Tanana River in the Tanana Valley, and it is the coldest city in the United States, with a January monthly mean of minus 8.3 degrees Fahrenheit and a July mean of 62.9 degrees.

Fort Wainwright, built east of the city beginning in 1938 as Ladd Field, was annexed into the city limits during the 1980s, and after the 1968 Prudhoe Bay oil discovery Fairbanks became a supply point for the oil field and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System.

Fairbanks is home to the University of Alaska Fairbanks, founded in 1917, whose Constitution Hall hosted the drafting of the Alaska Constitution in the winter of 1955 to 1956.

Fairbanks International Airport sits three miles southwest of the city's central business district, and the city is nicknamed the Golden Heart City.

The Alaska Goldpanners play the annual Midnight Sun Game at Growden Memorial Park, a tradition since 1906 in which the game is played without artificial lights starting after ten at night on the summer solstice.

The city hosts the World Ice Art Championships in February and the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics and the Tanana Valley State Fair in July, and Creamer's Field Migratory Waterfowl Refuge and Pioneer Park are among its attractions.

Fairbanks is the starting and ending point for the Yukon Quest, a 1,000-mile international sled dog race that alternates its start and finish between Fairbanks and Whitehorse, Yukon.