Today we left Tok Alaska headed for the Yukon. It was going to be an 8 hour drive which we were not looking forward to. Our tour guide Matt and our bus driver Lance loaded the bus just after 9 AM and we headed out. Almost right away we saw a moose eating in a small pond right near the road.
They have the coaches stop along the way to get out and stretch and get something to eat. Our first scheduled stop was in Chicken Alaska. Chicken is not really what you would call a town, in the winter it has a population of 6. In the summer a little more.
Chicken is named because the state bird of Alaska is a Ptarmigan but no one in town knew how to spell that and it looks kind of like a chicken, so what the heck.
Here are some pictures of Chicken – first the obligatory tourist picture – you can tell that Conrad is on Vacation if he will pose for a picture like this.
There isn’t running water or public sewers in Chicken so if you wanted to visit the rest room you visited the Chicken Poop.
Here is the whole community of Chicken. Gift shop, liquor store, bar, and restaurant. It was only about 10:00 but Cody was hungry so we visited the restaurant and the cook took a liking to Cody and made him a very good hamburger.
In the bar people leave their hats which are all attached to the roof.
Once you leave Chicken headed for the Yukon, you are on dirt roads. Now we are in a huge luxury coach, and the dirt road is narrow and very winding. Lance our driver, and Mike his brother who was driving the other coach that was following us, had the two groups of passengers compete against each other in a Chicken Dance competition. Mom Mom participated in the dance contest and she was pretty good at the Chicken Dance. Since Lance is getting married at the end of next week, his brother Mike had their whole bus put fake dollar bills in Lance’s pockets as the dance finished. Kind of a Chicken Alaska version of the bachelor party.
When we left Chicken, a pilot truck had to go before us and radio back to the coach if there were cars or trucks coming in the other direction, or pot holes or large rocks in the road. There is one Pilot truck in Chicken and he takes you all the way to the Canadian border and then heads back to Chicken to get the next bus.
We saw gold mining operations along the way.
Our bus driver Lance stopped the bus briefly and got out and “panned for gold” he came back to the bus with a pan full of gold wrapped Hershey kisses.
The 8 hour trip went by quickly but the views were unbelievable. The sky’s and the mountains went on forever.
This is the dirt road we traveled, called the Top of The World Highway. It was beautiful. It ran along a ridge line for more than a hundred miles and it was spectacular. You really did feel like you were on the top of the world.
We passed through customs at the Canadian border but right before we left Alaska we stopped to see the welcome to Alaska sign on the other side of the road. It was a beautiful overlook.
Shortly after we crossed the border we saw a Caribou.
We reached Dawson, coming in from above. Here is a view from the road into town.
Dawson City is across the Yukon River and there is no bridge so they out you on a ferry. This is not like any ferry you have ever seen. One coach fits on the ferry. There is no paved road. In the morning a tractor levels the dirt down to the water, and the ferry pulls up to the dirt ramp and you drive on. They drop you on the Dawson side at another dirt ramp that was just built in the morning. Here is a picture of a car getting off the ferry to give you some idea.
Here is a picture from the ferry. Amazing skies as we cross the Yukon river.
We arrived in Dawson to another Westmark hotel but it is designed to look like all of the other buildings in town so you can’t even tell its a hotel.
All of the sidewalks in town are boardwalks.
There are beautiful gardens outside of the hotel.
Our room is very nice. We are here for 2 days and nights so it is a nice place to have such a cute room.
We took a short walk around town after dinner and then headed back to the hotel to relax a bit before we head out to the “Toast of the Dome”. They take us to the top of a mountain nearby where there is a 360 view of the area and we toast the land of the midnight sun. I will post pictures of that tomorrow.
We loved our trip through Tok to Dawson. It went through some interesting little communities and along some of the most beautiful highways we have ever seen. Unfortunately Holland America has decided that starting next year they will fly people from Fairbanks to Dawson City. It may mean the end of some of the small places that we saw. We think it was much more interesting to drive the stretch between Fairbanks and Dawson. We will be among the last trips to see that section of Alaska on a tour.