The sternwheeler Discovery has carried more than a million passengers along the Chena River since 1950, when Jim Binkley launched the first vessel from a hand-hewn dock near the confluence with the Tanana. The family still captains the boats today, narrating the same braided channels their great-grandfather charted when Fairbanks was a supply hub for Interior Alaska miners and trappers. The three-hour Fairbanks riverboat cruise and local village tour combines open-deck river transit with a guided stop at a reconstructed Chena Athabascan settlement, where visitors witness fish-wheel operation, traditional cache construction, and demonstrations of the subsistence patterns that sustained Dené peoples through Interior winters. The route threads a landscape of boreal forest and gravel bar where the Chena's current shifts course each spring breakup. Mid-journey, the captain beaches the vessel at a wooded clearing occupied by the Chena Village, a living-history site built in partnership with local Athabascan elders. Guides explain the engineering behind elevated food caches that keep provisions safe from bears, the function of birch-bark canoes in summer travel, and the role of sled dogs in winter trapline work. A working kennel adjacent to the village houses Iditarod-bred huskies; handlers demonstrate harnessing techniques and recount the logistics of thousand-mile sled races across the Alaska Range. The Chena River itself tells a hydrological story uncommon in temperate zones. Its waters rise from alpine seeps in the White Mountains, flow through permafrost terrain where ground ice shapes the channel geometry, and freeze to a depth of four feet each winter. Summer visitors see the river in its brief open-water window, when salmon runs draw brown bears to the banks and moose wade the shallows to browse willow. The riverboat tour narrates this ecology in real time, identifying osprey nests in spruce snags, explaining the sediment load that stains the water the color of weak tea, and pointing out the remains of gold dredges that chewed through gravel benches during the early twentieth-century boom. The tour departs from a fixed dock on Discovery Drive, where a small museum displays artifacts from the Binkley family's seven decades of river piloting. Reservations secure a seat on one of three daily departures; the vessels accommodate up to 900 passengers on open-air decks with bench seating arranged stadium-style for unobstructed sightlines. The experience is designed as an educational loop rather than a scenic cruise, prioritizing cultural interpretation over passive observation.