You cringe at the cheesiness until you see resident miner Dexter Clark sift through a random load of dirt until gold appears. Chad and I give it a try and net a total of $24 worth of gold between us - not enough to buy an hour of darkness, though, which would be kind of nice at this point. "When you get tired, you close your eyes and go to sleep," Clark tells me. "Don't you know that trick?"

But the problem in Fairbanks in the summer isn't going to sleep (although exiting a local haunt like the Marlin bar at two a.m. into broad daylight doesn't exactly help you to know when to say when), it's sleeping in. Unless your bedroom is underground, the chances of waking up to the annoying blare of an alarm isn't likely. How does 4:55 a.m. sound? My thoughts exactly.

While a visit to Fairbanks and the surrounding area in winter mostly involves a search for the elusive northern lights, a summer trip to the area revolves around the pursuit of the midnight sun (and let me tell you, it's a heck of a lot easier to find). The difference is like … ahem … night and day. Fairbanksans go all out for summer solstice, planning all manner of midnight activities and uttering such non-Lower 48 colloquialisms to each other as, "Have a good ­solstice." (After nearly eight months under the paralyzing grasp of relative darkness, you'd say silly things like that too.)

In Fairbanks proper, the midnight sun is hard to spot. It sits so low on the horizon that the surrounding hills block it from view from most vantage points. So, after attempting to see it at the Midnight Sun Baseball Game (no) and the Midnight Sun Festival (no), we head up to Ester Dome, one of the highest points in the Fairbanks area.