Chicken, Alaska, United States
Taylor Hwy - Chicken
We are on top of the World – Taylor
Hwy:
- In Alaska it is the Taylor Hwy – it is open from middle of May or when the snow is gone and it will close Sept 1
- Once you reach the Border to Canada we are 1 hour ahead of time back to the Pacific time
- The Poker Creek (US) or Little Gold (Can) border is North America’s most northern international border crossing
Along the Top of the World highway
As we start out to drive up and
already when approaching Tok, we came through an area with lots and lots of old
forest fire, when Gine read that in 2004 a lightning started a fire and it
burned 1.1 Mill acres of forest – overall in that year they had 707 forest
fires in the interior of Alaska burning 6.6 Mill acres of forest. Wow!!! I mean
this made it possible that we could see further and had some super amazing
views. Did I mention the blue sky????
All our trip to Chicken it was paved
but with pot holes, gravel patches and lots of dips and bumps. We stopped a few
times at the view points to have super views on the endless burned forest – or
the endless mountainous valleys – it is such an amazing country.
Camping along Mosquito Creek
Once we arrived in chicken, we checked
out the Saloon and Paul said he is not super eager to “camp” there, then we
checked out the RV Park and decided it is too pricey for only camping and then
we went back to the Mosquito Creek. After the bridge on the right hand side
were some spots they didn’t totally thrilled us, we checked out the other side,
but then there were many no parking signs. So we went to the Day use area and
couldn’t see a no camping or no overnight stay sign and decided to set up. Ok
if you read the super mini fine print it says, that you can’t camp on a tiny
piece of paper in between a lot of pieces of papers – Really who reads that.
Then the guy cleaning the bathroom came by and told us about the strawberries
and as he didn’t mention anything we decided we are good to stay.
Gine had a shower – and then Paul
decided to spend some time with the Mosquitos outside to repair our faulty
light system as we had now twice blown fuses.
And can you believe it, when we went
to bed at 11 pm it was not raining!!!!!
A walk with the cat in the sunshine
We woke up to sunshine!!!! Wow – we
moved the truck, so everything was in the sun and went outside – Mandy was
super eager to be outside and couldn’t be hold back, after she tangled herself
up with the leash several times, Paul went for a walk with her around the whole
parking lot, then Gine went for a walk – and she still wanted to go and go
until we finally put her inside: really a bit peace and quiet.
Where are the Chicken???
- This is kind of a unique town in winter it has a population of 15 and in summer 30-50
- Chicken has no telephone and no flush toilets – unless you have a satellite phone
- In winter the road is closed and the first plows come in April
- So do they get mail: by plane twice a week, kids are home schooled
- They discovered gold here in 1886 in Franklin Gulch and in 1896 Bob Mathieson found it in the upper chicken creek, he built a cabin and around 700 men worked here for the next 2 years
- The townspeople decided to call it Ptarmigan but no-one could decide how to correctly spell it and since they didn’t want to be the butt of jokes they decided to call it chicken isnstead
- It 1903 it got a post office and in 1906 it got Tisha’s Schoolhouse
- In 1939 the FE company bought the claims and townsite and it became a camp, the pedro dredge was moved from Fairbanks to chicken in 1959 and operated until 1967 (in 1998 after sitting idle for 31 years the million pound dredge was moved in one piece to it’s current location)
Downtown Chicken:
We went back to “downtown” chicken,
were some of the old buildings are still standing, a few in a row are now
tourist stores, café and saloon and yes there is a chicken. Gine went yesterday
and again into the salon, as it is so cool they have hats all over the
ceiling… after it we went to the main
attraction:
Pedro Dredge #4: this is one huge
dredge – it got bought by Mike Busby and Bernie Karl and then moved here as a
tourist attraction. It is super cool to walk around this like 4-story high building
– I seriously can’t imagine that this thing can “swim” in a river – it is so
gigantic. We walked around it and also checked out all the buckets close by and
yes the old caterpillars etc – I don’t even know how many old rusty vehicles
and caterpillars we saw on this trip. But this thing is super cool!! I would
like to see it work.
The Chicken: yes here is another
chicken statue it got made from old school lockers in homer and looks super
cute
The suspension bridge: and a bit
further down the road (yes if you want you could stop at some more old log
buildings and more old machinery) we stopped and walked over the mini
suspension bridge and could take another picture with a rooster and a chicken,
the best was the sign “I got laid in Chicken”.
Ok time to leave this “historical”
tourist attraction and move on – as it was so hot and warm we decided to skip
the walk to the another Dredge.
And the gravel starts
As we leave chicken the gravel road
starts, and the scenic drive begins. At one time we had to slow down as a
motorhome was sitting on the side – I guess they drove to far on the outside
and slid down – guess it will take a while until you get a tow truck all the
way out here. Better look where to drive.
We crossed one river or fork and the
water here is kind of brown-reddish.
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Good bye Alaska
We spend around one month in Alaska
and we decided: for us it was a once-in-a-lifetime-trip, as we will not come
again with our RV – we look forward to come with a cruise.
Highlights of our trip to Alaska:
- The Boat trip to the Columbia Icefield was amazing (a bit cold)
- Denali: the scenery was amazing, we like to go to the landslide and the one day of sunshine
- The Walk to the Byron Glacier Icefield near Whittier
- Checking out the Independence Mine and going over the Hatcher Pass
- The Car museum in Fairbanks – one of our favourites
- Everywhere you can see the old machinery from the building of the highway: old trucks, caterpillars – it is so cool, I would love to bring only one of them home for our yard
And what was not so great:
- Except a very few days we had every day rain – mostly clouds and often were not able to see the mountains
- Paid Parking: you pay in nearly every state park for parking!!!
- Campgrounds are really not great: they were extremely expensive and then you still had to pay for shower and sometimes we didn’t even had wifi, picnic table were optional and rare and often the campgrounds are gigantic parking lots – really you call that camping. Even with staying only 25% of the time on campgrounds we paid more than the month before in BC/Yukon where we stayed half the time on campgrounds
- Along the roads on rest areas there is often no garbage, even some campgrounds have no garbage bins
- Overall, everything is more expensive in Alaska, food, you pay a lot for tiny museums or tours (guess they go with the assumption if you spend that much time or money to come here, you won’t mind to pay a bit more) – so there were a few things we didn’t do, because we thought it is too much
- The Alaskan Ferry need to be booked way to far in advance – that means you can’t be spontaneous, we booked the Skagway/Haines and this brought us into a time pressure and we had to keep going when we wanted to stay, we would have liked to take the Valdez-Whittier Ferry, but two weeks was not enough notice so we had a 3-day detour to make.
And what did we miss:
- The bears in the river (way to pricey),
- the boat tour into the Prince William Sound (way to rainy),
- the famous Wrangel-St. Elias NP – we were running out of time as we had a booked campground later on
- relaxing camping on the Kenai Peninsula on the lakes and the ocean: it rained all the time
- a few nice hikes: it rained too much
- the drive all the end into the Denali (thanks to the landslide last year – instead to miles 80 you can only drive to mile 43)
- and we haven’t seen all the towns you can only reach by boat – so we need to take a cruise for that part
2025-05-22