To Chicken...and beyond!

Taylor Highway,
north to Chicken

Historic Chicken, Alaska

On Wednesday we awoke early to start driving north on the Taylor Highway for a side trip to Chicken, Alaska, and Dawson City, Yukon, the end of the Klondike Gold Rush trail. The first 75 miles or so of the trip was paved and mostly pothole-free, and then we neared the town of Chicken. The road turned to gravel, heavy gravel…which slowed our progress considerably. We pulled into Chicken, an itty bitty little town of 17 year round residents that swells to 50 in the summer. This former gold mining hub was so named because the miners wanted to call it Ptarmigan after the bird that is common in the area. Legend says they couldn’t agree on the spelling and so named it Chicken. Easily half of the entire town is a little row of 3 storefronts (a gift shop, a saloon and a café) all owned by one family.

Chicken Creek Saloon

One half of the town of Chicken

The tiny gift shop, unabashedly named the Chicken Mercantile Emporium, offers tchotchkes and knick knacks of all varieties employing one silly chicken joke or another. It’s great fun. The Chicken Creek Saloon is decorated with thousands of baseball caps presumably from tourists who’ve passed through over the years. Not one square inch of ceiling or wall can easily be seen from the doorway for all the hats. Ha! Between the Saloon and the Café sits the home of the Attack Chickens with an ominous warning: ‘Beware of Attack Chickens’, though they looked pretty harmless to me. The ChickenCreek Café offers a wide selection of pies, brownies, giant cookies and other homemade pastries…all very tasty, I’m sure. Outside is the Chicken Poop, the porta-potties, of course.

Attack chickens

Across the street is the Chicken Gold Camp and Outpost, a log cabin peddling local arts and crafts as well as sandwiches, soups and pastries. The Gold Camp is also the home of the Pedro Dredge, a giant old piece of machinery used to scoop up huge bucketfuls of the muddy banks of Chicken Creek looking for gold. We walked around and noticed we were being watched by an enormous chicken statue overlooking the Gold Camp. He was adorable and a little creepy at the same time.

Other half of the town of Chicken

We turned back onto Taylor Highway and crossed over Chicken Creek. We had come to the north end of the town of Chicken…a small store and campground rolled into one, the Goldpanner Gift Shop and Chicken Creek RV Park. Our 5 minute tour of historic Chicken had ended.

The gravel, however, did not end. In fact, at this point, it developed a sense of humor by adding a healthy dose of red brown dirt. What dirt didn’t stay on the road quickly attached to the car…ours or someone else’s. So covered in brown muck, it couldn’t be determined what color some of the cars were originally. We motored on, albeit slowly, and at least the dust wasn’t flying around because soft rain was falling.

Boundary Lodge, an old roadhouse

About 40 miles later, we found the Boundary Lodge, one of the first Alaskan roadhouses. Roadhouses were built to provide weary Gold Rush travelers with food, lodging and entertainment. This one had a sagging, sod-covered roof, something we’ve seen more than a few times. Eventually we reached the Canadian border and paved road again.

On Top of the World

The ‘Top of the World Highway’ begins north of Chicken at a junction in Alaska called Jack Wade. From there it continues all the way to the banks of the Yukon River in West Dawson, YT. We had been asked several times if we intended to drive it by some folks on the boat trip to Juneau, a visitor center guide, our neighbors at the campground in Skagway and even the Canadian customs official in Fraser, so we felt compelled to check it out. Indeed, on a clear day, mountain ranges can be seen one behind the other as far as the eye can see. But, we did not visit on a clear day and much of what we saw lay just beyond the edge of the road as there is no guardrail. Portions of the trip were so socked in with fog that we could barely see the nose of the car.

Ferry across the Yukon River to Dawson City

Despite this, at times, the cloud cover lifted and the valleys below us swept up to close hills with more hills behind them and still more beyond those. What we didn’t see, though, was any animals, save for a squirrel or a bird here and there. The ‘Top of the World Highway’ is supposed to make you feel like you can reach up and touch the clouds, though when we drove through there it felt more like they were sitting on us.

Sternwheeler on the Yukon

We continued until we reached the ferry across the Yukon River to Dawson City. The river is very wide, fast and murky with branches and such rushing by. We watched a sternwheeler moving with the current and within seconds it was past us. Once we were loaded onto the ferry we could really see how difficult the current is to fight as the ferry made a huge U trying to cross the river in a straight line.

Historic Dawson City with wooden sidewalks

Dawson City, the ultimate goal of the Klondike Gold Rush stampeders, is a quaint town of historic buildings and wooden sidewalks, like Skagway, though the streets here are still mud, like in 1896 when it was settled. The town was established after gold was discovered in Rabbit Creek (now called Bonanza Creek) nearby. Considering its substantial distance (about 550 miles) from Skagway and Dyea where most of the gold seekers started, only the most adventurous and determined reached Dawson. As a result the town developed a reputation, completely earned, as a dangerous place full of brothels, saloons and gambling halls as well as a healthy contingent of con men available to relieve the miners of their gold.

Part of a poem by Robert Service

We discovered that both Jack London (the author) and Robert Service (the poet) had homes here, though neither gentleman lived in luxury. Both houses are humble log cabins with a couple of spare little outbuildings. After the initial influx of folks turned the town into a muddy tent camp, wealthier residents built elaborate hotels, churches, and residences. The construction of the Palace Grand Theatre, a European style theater and dance hall, gave the city the reputation as the ‘Paris of the North’ at the time.

Robert Service's log cabin

After a high of over 30,000 residents in 1898 and 1899, the town is now home to just under 2,000 cold-loving folks. Several setbacks forced folks out of town, mostly the discovery of gold in other parts of the North, a typhoid outbreak in 1898 and some major fires between 1898 and 1902 that destroyed whole blocks of businesses. We wandered into the large visitor center building and found a slew of information about points of interest around town. We trudged back out into the light rain and through the muddy streets to visit some of the sights. Descriptions of the buildings and their stories adorn large plaques next to those maintained by Parks Canada and we visited most of them.

3rd Street Complex...listing to port

One particularly interesting group of buildings was the 3rd Street Complex, a completely unrestored set of old businesses. The plaque next to them mentions that when heated buildings are built on top of frozen ground, the combination causes the footings to sink a different rates into a quagmire of dense mud. The town has specifically not restored this charming group so visitors can watch as they eventually lean so close they touch each other, and presumably, eventually fall down. What an interesting little town Dawson is, and with such a colorful history.

Bonanza Market

On our way out of the city, we stopped in at the Bonanza Market and bought a homemade cornish pasty, a little meat pie and a chocolate croissant for a late lunch…all super yummy. We were loaded back onto the ferry for the trip across the Yukon River and began our drive home to the RV in Tok. At one point we saw a mountain goat (or maybe it was a Dall sheep) up on a hillside just as we were passing him. A bit later, we saw a wolf jog across the road up ahead of us (how exciting!) though he was much too fast for the camera.

Thanks for visiting
Dawson City!

The 4 ½ hour return trip was only slightly less foggy than the morning, but significantly muddier. The all-day rain had turned the dirt and gravel roads to a thick sluice of mud through which we slid over and over. Without a guardrail to the cliff side and with only a shallow ditch on the mountain side, it was a harrowing adventure. Fortunately, we were only almost hit by a truck just once, who was determined to occupy both slim sides of the roadway. The views of the mountains were only a little more illuminated by a few small spaces between the clouds, but mostly, we just wanted to get back to the RV and relax. The poor car, having been washed only the day before, is now barely recognizable, covered in thick mud.

Finally pulling into the RV park at 7:30pm we finished off the chocolate croissant, enjoyed a short happy hour and dragged ourselves to bed.