Day Eleven: Dawson City to Tok and don’t forget Chicken!

Dawson City to Tok and don’t forget Chicken!

Today I have been looking forward to for a long time, the “Top of the world Highway”, the highway leads out of Dawson Just after crossing the Yukon River and climbs up the mountain range to the top and stays there all the way to Alaska and your border crossing in to the US.

The Crossing of the Yukon River gives you pause as the mighty river pushes under the ferry, you can see and feel its power as full size trees are flowing with it, looking at the other side you see the ferry struggle to keep ground as cars precariously take to the shore and I say to myself Oh please don’t dump it getting off the ferry.

We ride the mountain tops from here to the boarder where the smooth roads will turn to pothole hell, I feel like the Canadians must have a road crew just out of sight waiting to sweep the road clean as you pass, next customer Please, and thank you, then you get to the US side and they are laying mortars’ every 100 yards as you pass they say dam it lets blow the road up some more we can get the next guy.

It’s a lonely outpost at the border, but its still all business, don’t pull up tell the guy wakes up and turns the light on that says pull forward they are a little pissy about that! In 2013 the guy stood there looking at me finally waved his arm so I moved forward, you would think I stepped on his puppy, he said he was waiting for me to turn my head light off, his waving arm was to tell me to turn off the head light so he could see my license plate? (it’s a motorcycle BTW) any way we were about 5min before the boarder closed, so he likely closed the books and was ready to call it a night when we pulled up.

Chicken is a census-designated place in Southeast Fairbanks Census Area, Alaska, United States. Chicken is a community founded on gold mining and is one of the few surviving gold rush towns in Alaska. The population was 7 in 2010 and in recent years there have become two Chickens, I guess whom ever owned the land next to the highway decided to put up a new town, OK a few buildings, it now sits in front of the original Chicken, which is also made up of just a few buildings and the Chicken poop!

Tok:

The town of Tok began in 1942 as an Alaska Road Commission camp used for construction and maintenance of the Alaska Highway. So much money was spent in the camp's construction and maintenance that it earned the nickname "Million Dollar Camp" from those working on the highway

This photo of Tok, give you a good idea of what it looks like today, the Alaska Highway running through the center gives it the feeling of riding down a runway at your local airport, I actually looked up a few times just in case!