The Discovery III carries 900 passengers along the Chena River's braided channels, one of only a handful of working sternwheelers left in North America. Launched in 1975 by the Binkley family—riverboat pilots since the 1898 Klondike Gold Rush—the vessel plies the same route that once ferried miners, trappers, and mail to Interior Alaska camps unreachable by road. Its red paddlewheel turns at twelve revolutions per minute, propelling the triple-deck hull through currents that drop ten degrees Celsius between June and September. Today the Princess Fairbanks Riverboat Cruise serves as both heritage vessel and environmental classroom. The three-hour voyage threads past birch and black spruce forests that line the Chena's gravel bars, stopping at a reconstructed Athabascan fish camp where guides demonstrate salmon-wheel operation and the tanning process for moose hide. A second landing brings passengers to the Binkley kennel, where 35 Alaskan huskies—many descended from Iditarod bloodlines—demonstrate harness technique and the mechanics of sled braking. Narration includes river depth readings, ice-breakup chronology, and the engineering challenges of operating steam boilers in sub-zero winter departures. The sternwheeler's shallow draft—just 1.2 metres fully loaded—allows navigation of sandbars and oxbow bends inaccessible to propeller craft. Its open upper deck offers unobstructed views of the Alaska Range's southern foothills, visible 80 kilometres south on clear days, while enclosed lower cabins feature archival photographs documenting the 1967 Chena River flood that submerged downtown Fairbanks beneath four metres of water. The Binkleys retrofit the boiler annually and maintain period woodwork throughout the passenger saloons, preserving the aesthetic of early 20th-century river transport while meeting contemporary Coast Guard stability standards. Fairbanks riverboat tours operate from a purpose-built dock on Discovery Drive, constructed on pilings to accommodate the Chena's two-metre seasonal fluctuation. The site includes a boarding pavilion with ticket counters and interpretive panels detailing the river's role in Alaska's territorial economy, when sternwheelers delivered freight to mining districts along the Tanana and Yukon drainages before the Parks Highway opened in 1971.