The Road to Chicken

Chicken, Alaska

The road to Chicken and then up to Dawson City in the Yukon is 167 miles of washboard gravel road. It's called the Top of the World Highway. The first problem is a flat tire on the Honda. I find the wood screw and patch the hole

We overnight in Chicken and burn all our collected firewood before crossing the border back into Canada. When we try to put out the main slide in Dawson City, it's broken again so we go to the hardware store and buy a handful of bolts to replace the one in the slide gearbox that's sheared off.

Mama killed a chicken,

Thought it was a duck.

Put it on the table

with the legs sticking up

- John Lee Hooker

We had just washed the RV and Honda back in Ninilchik about 600 miles back.

The views have been good.

Two things you never want to do after you hit 50 are sing Karaoke in a bar after midnight and start a collection of ceramic chickens...

 I take a six mile walk along the dirt road at 6 AM in Chicken and see a moose and several reindeer. When I weigh in upon return, I'm gratified to tip the scales at 199  which is down 41 pounds from February....when your little brother calls from Nevada to tell you that you look pregnant in your blog pictures it might be time to cut back on the calories

Burning up the firewood in Chicken

 Leftover stage from the last Chickenstock rock festival.

Trip Adviser says that this is the best place to eat in Chicken...

This moose finally wandered off to stand in the forest. I met her on my morning walk near Chicken.

The reindeer were more shy than the moose.

 167 miles of this from Tok to Chicken to Dawson City....

Passing truck....

 The Yukon....Remember Sgt. Preston of the RCMP? No? Not old enough? Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!

The Place You Go to Listen

Chicken, Alaska

We are at 65 degrees North latitude. It’s a month after the summer solstice. The area has been losing 7 minutes a day of daylight since then, but there are still nineteen hours left.

It won’t be dark enough to see the Aurora Borealis until the 2nd week of August. The magnetic fields from the Aurora cause corrosion in pipes, including the Alaska Pipeline, which passes nearby.


The main tourist attractions in Fairbanks were the riverboat ride and the El Dorado gold mine. We do both and find ourselves surrounded on each tour by at least 30 cruise ship tour buses. It’s like déjà vu all over again, but we pan $16 in gold flakes anyway, visit a mock Athabasca native village, see some Caribou in a pen and see some sled dogs pull an ATV around a backyard lake.

We like the Museum of the North at the University of Alaska- Fairbanks campus. My favorite exhibit was “The Place You Go to Listen”. It is a small room that monitors the Sun, Moon, earth tremors and the Aurora Borealis. The Borealis sounds like little bells on the ceiling. The constant tremors come in like a bass drum. The sun has a constant high energy, new age sound.



We drive 300 miles east to Chicken, Alaska. Chicken has a year-round population of 17, but that swells to about 100 during the summer gold mining season. Robin runs the Post Office and Sue makes cinnamon rolls. I don’t expect much internet or phone coverage the next few weeks. Chicken boasts that it doesn’t have indoor plumbing. Legend has it that the locals wanted to name the place Ptarmigan, but couldn’t agree how to spell it. I buy a souvenir T-shirt for my son (not the one that says “I got laid in Chicken, Alaska”).

We gas up at Chicken at $3.50 a gallon before the 100 mile drive gravel road drive to Dawson in Canada, where prices are around $6.00. Before crossing the border we find a campground on a river, provided by the Bureau of Land Management. The fee for camping is negligible and I’m half price because of my Golden Age parks card.

In the 11PM sunlight, I sit in my lawnchair and finish the Michener book about the incredible two-year overland trek from Edmonton to Dawson of Lord Evelyn Luton, son of the Marques of Deal. .These old English explorers had attitude. I begin planning our next trip, a float north to the Arctic Ocean on the Athabasca River.

Here are some shots of Fairbanks and some Denali drive-by pix.