Severance Travels: 16th Alaskan Stop (and final)

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.