Bound to miss the Perseids again tonight. A thunderstorm is supposed to roll through tonight — third night in a row here — and besides, metro Chicago is no place to see celestial phenomena very well, except maybe a bright moon or planet.

I visited two major Fairbanks cemeteries during my late July visit, in reverse chronological order. First I went to Birch Hill Cemetery, founded in 1938 as an alternative to Clay Street Cemetery closer to downtown, which was founded simultaneously with the settlement itself in 1903.

As the name implies, Birch Hill is on a hill. In our time, the hill overlooks the Steese Highway, where it meets the Johansen Expressway. At that particular junction are such major retailers as Home Depot, Costco, Fred Meyer, REI and Walgreen’s, so the traffic is relatively heavy and the cemetery relatively noisy. You get used to that.

Though they aren’t on this interesting list, I imagine that those Home Depot and Costco locations are the northernmost of the respective chains.

I tromped around Birch Hill for a good half hour.

The cemetery included a number of special sections, such as Pioneers Plot 1.

In that section, there (unsurprisingly) are old stones.

And newer markers for people who came to Fairbanks in its pioneer years, such as one Joseph Landers, who died “About 80” in 1936. He might have come when he was about 50 already; couldn’t have been too much earlier. Must have been a tough old bird.

The memorial, which is obviously newer than 1936, says it was put there by Igloo No. 4. Eh? I looked it up. That’s the Fairbanks lodge of the the Pioneers of Alaska.

The Pioneers’ web site says: “[The organization was] first organized in Nome on February 14, 1907, with the mission:

To preserve the names of Alaska’s pioneers on its rolls;
To collect and preserve the literature and incidents of Alaska’s history;
And to promote the best interests of Alaska.”

That seems to include fixing plaques to Alaska pioneer graves, presumably unmarked or whose markers had been ravaged by the northern climate. There were others besides Mr. Landers in Pioneer Plot 1.

Loyal Order of Moose are on the hill, too.

Along with unusual gravesites whose honorees may or may not have belonged to a fraternal organization, such as A.A. Zimmerman, whom the plaque says donated the land for the cemetery.

A few days later, I made my way to the Clay Street Cemetery, which is tucked away in a residential neighborhood near downtown Fairbanks.

It’s a flat parcel, but not without its charms.

Igloo No. 4 put in a few memorials here, too.

Other individual graves. Pioneer women, in these cases.

This plaque, dedicated in 2002, lists 89 men, mostly buried in the cemetery, who died in gold mining accidents near Fairbanks from 1905 to 1918.

“Underground mining was dangerous during this pioneer era,” the plaque says. “Most died from cave-ins, falling down shafts, being struck by material while in a shaft, and gas asphyxiation. The miners were often young, single, foreign-born ‘pick and shovel’ laborers. They were far from home.”