But you can breathe the air and drink the water.
What water? The rivers don't flow, there's almost no snow, much of what snow there is is polluted, and it's usually under a foot at peak. If one doesn't have an external way to melt the snow, ingesting that supercold snow takes upwards 2× the calories it allows metabolizing to melt.
Plus, despite the summer humidity and inflow of creeks galore... Fairbanks is in the middle of a subarctic desert. There have been years where the winter snow in fairbanks never crossed 2" at any given time, and was brown with exhaust fumes (the most common source of condensation nuclei.) plus plows and the various salts used to clear the roads (not all of it is NaCl) make any near the roads toxic.
If one's forced in that cold, without a muffler, frostbite of the nose gets common; without goggles, one's eyes can be stuck open, (which, by the way, HURTS LIKE «BLEEP«ING HELL,) and you can get frostbite on the exposed face. Frost nip at -30° can occur in still air within 15 minutes. Once the nose is frostbitten, it no longer prewarms the air; at that point, frostbite in the lungs.
For all intents, it's best to treat Fairbanks winters as having a severe taint... If you have to work outside at -40°F, you really should have a muffler, ski goggles, insulated overtrousers, an insulated coat with hood, a knit cap, and snow boots with ice cleats. The record in downtown fairbanks was -55°F, 1989. I went there that year. My eyelids stopped working within 1 minute of exiting the car; my ability to focus was lost just before the door of the church, two minutes or so later. It took a minute for things to melt, once I was in the 65°F church. I was in a USAF heavy parka, USAF insulated trousers, a pair of Sorels rated for -40°F, USAF Nomex Flight Gloves, and US Army snow mittens over them. And a tuke, army issue, and tube scarf, USAF issue. No goggles, no cleats. I wish I had thought to bring both. (Of those, the coat and snowpants were actual issue, via CAP; the rest bought at either DRMO or the Elmendorf AFB or Fort Richardson Military Clothing Sales - and all authorized for off-duty wear.) Oh, and even with a muffler... breath in through the mouth, out through the nose - the mouth has more surface area and is less readily damaged than the nose.
Barrow is even worse. Sure, it has public water and sewere... for a part of town. The temp is so cold, they use tunnels for the utilities and trash. And, for those not on the water & sewer lines, nightsoil buckets. Number of times per week by number of residents. Open the hatch, lower the bucket, close the hatch. In the morning, empty bucket, same size, on the line, pull it up. It's possible (but not usually allowed) to get from house to house that way.
The nightsoil bucket does go to the water treatment plant, in the buckets.
Now, there is plenty of water by barrow... but it's not drinkable, either... it's the Arctic Ocean. Barrow does get more precip than Fairbanks... but it runs right off into the ocean as it melts.
People who have not experienced that kind of supercold, super dry, super dark weather have limited grasp of just how much like an uninhabitable wasteland it really is.
And yes, Fairbanks is surrounded by a lot of seasonal wetlands - it's the bottom of a 200+ mile diameter bowl...that all the 1-4 inches accumulated is going to flow down into as it melts in the spring... May or June, depending upon the year... This year, the buoy at Nenana finally moved May 8th, 1601 hours Z-9. (there's a pool as a fundraiser for Nenana, city of, this year, $222101 across 10 winners (so each of then got $22210.10)... But that whole bowl is a desert.
And in summer? Fairbanks hits the upper 90's in both °F and relative humidity... and enough mosquitoes to impede driving. Plus gnats, horseflies, some wonderfully agressive wasps, big bumblebees, and whitesocks (biting insects, Simuliidae family). So, hazardous but livable. But unpleasant.
