16th Alaskan Stop (and final) - Chicken

Well, we made it to Chicken, AK yesterday – all of 78 miles from Tok.  See map - see Highway 2 from Fairbanks southerly to Tok and then Highway 5 to the right up to Chicken.

 The drive took about 3 hours, partly due to not-so-good roads, but mostly due to my slow driving.  I have heard stories about bent/broken axles and springs so I was overly careful. 

Fires in 2004 decimated the landscape here - over 1.3 million acres.

The mountain sides are all black/brown - but you can see new life coming again.

We are basically in no-man’s land.  Here are some road pictures.

The first 15 miles was paved and in pretty good shape.

Then it went to gravel but still not bad.

The picture below shows our campground area from the road.

Our CG consists of some pull thru and back in sites (which we have) , a few cabins to rent, and a restaurant.  The restaurant is actually a big trailer converted into a kitchen.  In season there are about 100 people here – off season about 10.  

Chicken Creek was still flowing behind our site.

Here is our campsite – nice – backs up to Chicken Creek.  We only have an electrical hookup – power comes from a generator on site.  Our power has gone off 5 times in the past two hours, and then comes back on in a couple of minutes.  No water here – it has to be trucked in.  So we filled our fresh water tank this morning in Tok before we left.  And no sewer either, so we will carry everything with us to Dawson City on Wednesday.

There are three buildings in the town of Chicken – a Mercantile Store, a Bar and a Café.   

A post office is up a hill on the other side of the road. 

The mail goes out on Tuesday and Friday by plane.  So I doubt that you could get overnight delivery!!  We drove out to the airport - pretty busy as you can see.

They give tours here of the old town of Chicken.  Unfortunately, the person doing it had left already for the season.  However, there was another guy here (actually a school superintendent for the area here.  He told us that the requirements for the job were to have a 4-wheeler and a small plane – and he had both!).  He has been here for 35 years.  He is retired now but also worked for Texas Tech for 11 years as a consultant – they wanted someone with knowledge of Alaska and mining.  He took us all around the old town and told us about the mining history.  Here is the main road in...

And some of the buildings.

Their plan is to resurrect the town with the artifacts that they are finding, but it will take some time.

When we got back to the CG, we got our pans out and he showed us how to pan for gold.  They actually have a rock pile here that came from a miner further north who struck gold and brought a truck load down here for the recreational panners to work.  It started raining so we had to hurry but he gave us a good lesson.  And we did find some gold – 3 small specks!  But they are in our vial now and we will try again later today or tomorrow for sure.

Over the last 100 years or so they have been finding equipment that was used for mining gold.  The biggest was this Dredge that they have on display.

We did actually do some panning and here we are.

And here are a few more artifacts in Chicken...

Quite a place if I must say so myself!!!

Still cant update with pictures so you will have to wait a few more days!!

15th Alaskan Stop - Tok (again)

We left Fairbanks on Friday morning and had a nice drive (200 miles).  We had previously stayed at Tok RV Village before and liked it.  However, we didn't remember the part about only having 1 hour a day on the internet.  So we did not update the blog.

Around Delta Junction (about half way) we started seeing mountains to the west and south and wondered if it could possibly be Mt. McKinley in Denali.  But we looked it up and it is actually Mount Hayes, the tallest of the Alaska Range mountains visible from Delta Junction. It rises to 13,832 feet.

Here is our campsite.

There were very few campers here until Sunday afternoon when a caravan showed up. 

We left Tok on Monday morning...Chicken next!!

14th Alaskan Stop - Fairbanks (again)

On Tuesday we left Delta Junction and headed up the Richardson Highway to Fairbanks.  We saw a moose standing in some water in the ditch but didn’t get stopped in time for a picture.  Further on we saw a moose and her calf in a small clearing but as we slowed down, they saw us and ran into the woods.

We made it to Fairbanks, found our campground, and got set up.  Great CG with some alot of beautiful flowers.

These are dinner plate dahlias.

We also found Walmart and got stocked up on staples for our return trip thru Canada.

We got a call from Janice and Roger Kasper about 4:30 letting us know that they arrived in town.  So we met up with them at their motel, checked out the Chena River area that runs thru downtown.

Had to put this picture in - JCPenney was one of the contributors to have the downtown river area revitalized.

 The we decided on supper at the Silver Gulch Brewery in Fox, AK, 10 miles north of Fairbanks. 

We had to take pictures of these signs in the lobby.

We had some excellent beer and good food as well.  The restaurant itself was very large and very nice.  We ate and chatted for a couple of hours, and when we left, we noticed that the place was full, and, there was a long waiting line!!  Apparently this is a very popular place!!

We stopped at the pipeline on the way back and had some pictures taken. 

This is the same place that we stopped at back in early June and met Marie and Benny Benson who clued us in on the school host program.

We ended up back at their hotel and played a few games of Yatzee before finally leaving and going back to our CG.

On Thursday morning we met them at the University of Alaska Museum and toured the museum. 

Whaaaaatt???????

Saw a film on winters in AK and one on the northern lights.  After lunch Roger and Janice went panning for gold and then came over to our CG for supper of grilled salmon, etc.  The weather was great so we sat outside while we grilled the salmon.  We had both king salmon and sockeye salmon.  Of course, we later played more Yatzee!!

Judy and I were sure glad that we made the trip back to Fairbanks so that we could meet up with them and spend some quality time together.

Today we left Fairbanks and made it to Tok (about 210 miles).  At this point we have come full around – we started here in June and are now back.  We will spend the weekend here – Sunday night the musicians that we first saw here back in June will be here again and we wanted to hear them again.

Monday we take the Taylor Highway north to Chicken, AK to pan for gold.  Then we will continue on over the Top of the World Highway to Dawson City, YT.  The road in AK is known to be not-so-good so we will see.  Then we have to take a ferry across the Yukon River and then on a paved highway down to Whitehorse. 

Should be an interesting trip…