2004/07 Yukon trip - Trek to the Arctic - |
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Sunday 1st August
We awoke to blue skies and sunshine, and drove to the nearby Lakeview campground for breakfast on the beach, whereupon it started raining. And it rained all the way into Tok. Tok advertises itself as the Gateway to Alaska, and with some justification as from Tok you can drive southwest along the Glenn Highway towards Anchorage, or stay on the Alaska Highway to get to Fairbanks, or back up a little and take the Taylor Highway north towards Chicken. We’ll probably sample the first two routes on our next trip with John and Edna, but on this trip we were headed north to Chicken, Eagle, and Dawson City.
But first, a rainy day was a good time to sample the delights of Tok. This meant hitting the Visitors Centre, the laundromat, the food shop, liquor store to buy at USA prices, and the gas station. Tok has all of those plus campgrounds, bars, and souvenir stores. Tok is pronounced Toke, probably short for Tokyo Depot back when they were building the Alaska Highway, but nobody’s really sure.
However, staying in Tok wasn’t high on our list so we backed up a few miles on the Alaska Highway and headed north on the Taylor. Almost immediately we were into a burn, from this summer by the look of it, and it lasted about 25 miles, black on the hills and brown in the valleys where the permafrost may have saved some of the trees.
The rain stopped and the sun came out but it was a chilly day with the wind coming from the north. As we climbed the trees also became thinner, just a few on the mountainsides above us. This is called the “Fortymile” country as the river’s mouth was 40 miles south of Fort Reliance, an area that saw one of the early gold strikes in Alaska, even before the days of the Klondike. It’s also the wintering area for the great caribou herds that make their way 200 miles in the spring to their calving grounds near Fairbanks , so this is a great place to see caribou migrating either in the spring or fall, but not in early August.
We pulled into a Bureau of Land Management campground at the West Fork of the Fortymile River. It was a good spot at $8 a night. The burned area came right up the edge of the campground so they must have been really close to losing it.
The one thing we couldn’t do in Tok was pick up e-mail, as the CyberStore was closed on Sundays, but I found one spot in the campground where I could pick up the satellites with our phone: the top of the garbage dumpster!
Monday 2nd August
After all the rain we were pleased to see blue sky in the morning. We drove further north through more burned areas along the Taylor Highway to Chicken, Alaska. Apparently the miners wanted to call their town Ptarmigan, but couldn’t agree on how to spell it, and settled on the name Chicken which was a common nickname for the ptarmigans.
Even now there’s controversy. The focal point is Chicken Creek, as that’s where all the gold was and is still found, but there are at least three groups that claim to be the real Chicken. There’s “Beautiful Downtown Chicken”, which has a store, bar, and café, and the Original Chicken Center, which has gas, propane, a store, and gold-panning, and the Chicken Gold Camp, which has a 
camp site and a dredge. We ate enormous cinnamon buns at the café and bought gas at an amazing price and took pictures of the dredge, so we visited bits of them all. The dredge was a common mining tool in the 1900s. It was a barge that dug gravel out of the stream bed, agitated it to separate the heavy stuff (like gold) and dumped the rest out the back. Dredges had a terrible effect on the environment as one dredge could destroy a whole valley. However, they were amazing machines and there are very few of them left, though this area has a fair 
number. We hiked a trail just above Chicken to the Lost Chicken Mine Dredge. We don’t know if the chicken was lost or the mine was lost. This dredge was aground on a gravel bar and disintegrating, with the roof fallen in.
The road had turned to gravel and rock as we approached Chicken and it stays that way all the way to the border with the Yukon. We found another dredge on the highway, named after Jack Wade who mined this area for many years. This one was also falling apart. They are interesting chunks of history but nobody can afford to keep them up.
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