Wed Aug 29th – We woke up this morning to a brisk 27 degrees and our water hose frozen. It feels like Winter is coming……
We drove the Taylor Hwy from Tok.
The section that we were driving, to the town of Chicken, was paved….and a fairly decent road.
The scenery was spectacular and we felt ‘adventurous’. We kept marveling at the wonderful Fall colors…..
As the pavement ended, we came upon the town of Chicken. This is the whole town, with the mining dredge in the foreground.
The gold miners in this area had wanted to call their town “ptarmigan’…..only they couldn’t spell it ptarmigan…..so they named the town ‘Chicken’, the local slang for the ptarmigan birds. True story……
This is a picture of downtown Chicken…….No joke, really, that is all there is…..We stopped to check out ‘all things chicken’ and ended up having an early lunch of fresh out of the oven chicken pot pie!
While visiting with the gal who ran the general store we found out that Chicken has 6 or 7 year round residents. Everyone else laves, as the road is not plowed all winter. Now that is isolation…..
Back on the road and heading to Dawson City by way of the ‘Top of the World Hwy’, a gravel road with steep and winding turns…….
And caribou. We startled this herd as they were crossing the road. As we were driving into Chicken, we noticed a lot of trucks with 4 wheelers parked along the road. We guessed….hunters. The road signs noted that area to be a federally protected subsistence hunting area. While in Chicken we asked about the hunting. Moose season just ended, we were told, and caribou season just opened. So run, little caribou, run!
We crossed the Canadian border into the Yukon……
The landscape changed into rolling hills and tundra. The Fall colors are especially vivid in the tundra.
We really did not find this gravel Hwy to be all that challenging…….I guess it is all relative…..compared to some of the roads we drove in Utah!
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