To Chicken and over The Top of The World

June 23

As we left Fairbanks we decided that we like this little city. You really get the feel of the pioneer spirit that Alaska is known for here.

Our next stop was North Pole.


A tiny town that is hokey in the extreme, you do have to smile at the candy cane street light poles and Christmas decorations that seem to hang on them year round. Never again can Bill complain about our Christmas wreath staying up till Easter (a practice of many true NH-VT North Country natives)!


A visit to Santa Claus House was a must. The sheer volume of Christmas stuff there was overwhelming but the letters to Santa from kids all over the world that papered some of the walls were charming.

We stopped for lunch at a scenic outlook and boy, was it ever scenic! We were excited to see that Denali was visible. What a presence that mountain has! It was best seen through binoculars because of the haze, but it loomed over a large part of the horizon. It's glaciers gleamed in the sun. Mt. Foraker was also in view. That one is known to the Native Alaskans as "Denali's Wife." We had several other great views of them as we continued east.

Our next stop was at Rika's Roadhouse State Park.


Rika Wallner was a woman who came to AK and established a homestead on the banks of the Tanana River. She made a living by running a roadhouse and farming, all alone. She was well positioned to take advantage of both the prospectors and the river freight traffic, as there was a ferry freight weigh station at her landing. Her homestead was a neat little farm, with sound buildings and gardens. Today you can't stay there, but there is a restaurant that makes everything from scratch, and is very popular.


Reportedly, though she was a good farmer and hotelier, her food was not so good!

We proceeded on with a quick stop for some photos of the pipeline as it crossed the Tanana River.


When we pulled in to the lovely Moon Lake State Recreation Site our friends, Bette and Tom, were already there.
We camped near them and had a wonderful evening of shared dinner, lots of chat and laughs and a bit of wine around the campfire.


The breeze died and it cooled off and the lake looked like glass in the long hours it took for the sun to reach the horizon.


June 24
We awoke to a glorious day, so got off to a late start. Moon Lake called for us to stay longer, but we finally resisted it's pull. As Bette said just before we left, "I could live here." We drove on to Tok, where Bette and I shopped hard. Then it was time to say final good-byes for this trip. We headed on our separate ways toward the Canadian border. We left the Alaska Highway and turned onto the Taylor Highway, headed for Chicken. You might wonder why a town would be named Chicken. It seems they really wanted to name it Ptarmigan, after the bird that flourishes on the tundra, but no-one could spell that- hence, Chicken.







The Taylor Highway is a very high road that winds along the side of the mountains, through tundra that has seen a fire a few years ago. A man in Chicken told us it was in 2004 and burned 1.4 million acres. It was pretty desolate, and the road was not in very good repair. A couple of miles out of Chicken it began to rain lightly and the mud got slippery but we were still happy to be there! Fortunately the rain soon stopped and the road was just wet, not muddy.



Chicken is a tiny settlement, population 28. It began as a gold mine stake on Chicken Creek, and is still a gold mining town. However, it has gone commercial in a big way. There were several cafe and souvenir shops, tours of the historic buildings, a post office, fire department, gas pump and various other enterprises, even a camping area. There are no public services- each household provides it's own electricity, water and sewer. Needless to say, the generator rules! As well, I'm sure you've figured out that it is also the home of everything chicken. Kind of like Sue Ballou's extensive frog collection, but with clucks. The whole shebang sits in a tiny, dusty valley nearly a hundred miles from the nearest town.

We left Chicken and continued along the dirt road. From Chicken to Dawson City the road is called The Top of The World, and it certainly feels like it.


The scenery is breathtaking any way you look. It winds along the mountain side, near the top or along the actual spine of the ridge. You can see forever; mountain ranges lined up, one behind the other.
The road conditions ranged from rutty gravel to rutty gravel decorated with potholes. Top speed averaged about 25 miles per hour. After over 60 miles of this we came to Boundry, AK, population "about 8," as the sign said.


It had a couple of outhouses, three tiny cabins, an old original log cabin that serves as a gathering place for the 8 residents, a gas pump and a larger building which housed a tiny store where you could also buy hot dogs, coffee, soda and homemade brownies. Attached were the owner's living quarters. Turns out, he's from Dover, NH.


He's worked there several years but just bought it a year ago. He loves living in AK. He says you just sleep more in the winter and the lack of light doesn't bother you, but he spends some time in Hawaii anyway. He actually has a bit of winter business as there are three snowmobile tours that go "over the Top;" one in January, February and March.


He was a nice fellow and happy to see folks from "home." He actually lives in Tok in winter, except for the snow machine tour weeks.

Nine miles later we crossed from the USA into Canada and the road became paved, mostly. From that point on it really stuck to the ridge top until we descended into Dawson City another hundred miles later.
Average speed for that stretch was a whopping 40 miles per hour! Much of the time you could see the road stretching out in front of us, twisting like a serpent, a couple of ridges over. Bill said it reminded him of looking at the Great Wall of China.




After we camped on the banks of the Yukon River at Dawson City we walked down the beach to see what is called the " steamboat grave yard."





After the Alaskan Highway was finished and upgraded for civilian use, in the 1950's, the huge paddlewheel steamboats that had supplied the region with goods and travel were no longer needed.


Four of them were simply taken downstream and beached, left to rot back into the soil. Sixty years later they are still recognizable but are now not much more than a pile of boards and metal.


We could make out the name on two of them, the Seattle 2 and the Julia. I wonder who she was named for? It was sort of a sad place, but the encroaching trees, grass and flowers softened it a bit.




Yes, there were millions of hungry mosquitoes!



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