Alaska 4

Traveling east from Fairbanks we have come to Delta Junction, The "Official" end of the Alaskan Highway.  Fairbanks would like to have the claim to fame but this is the town that has it. 

We will travel the entire Alaskan Highway on this trip, just not in a continuous route or all in the same direction.  When we left Skagway and went to Whitehorse where we turned left on the Alaskan Highway and followed it until the town of Tok.  There we turned left again, departed the Alaskan Highway, and headed to Anchorage.  We have now returned to it by coming east onto the end of it.  From here we follow it back to the town of Tok where we turn north and follow that road to the "Top of the World" highway and the towns of Chicken and Dawson City.

Here also they have tamed some of the famous Alaska Mosquitoes for tourists to pose beside.  Yes, They are almost life-size!

The highway from Fairbanks to Tok was really flat and quite straight.   then we turned north on the Taylor Highway, a narrow winding two-lane road that was often gravel.  It wound through hundreds of thousands of acres of burned spruce trees.  The fires were a few to many years old but everything to the horizon had been burned at least once.  There were huge patches of Fireweed in bloom, like the purple smear on the hillside in the center of the picture.  This road will lead us to the town of Chicken.

Chicken is the "Big City" on this road, it has a gas station.  The story is that some gold mines wanted to name the town after a local bird named the Ptarmigan, but nobody could spell it!  So they called the town Chicken instead.  While we were there Kathy rented a gold pan and tried her luck.  She spent three hours panning the creek and found Gold!  

One flake as small as the period at then of this sentence.  But her sharp eyes did find it!  Then she gave it to one of the hobby miners camped there.  The famous Klondike gold rush is just over the hill at Dawson City.

From here the road leads east and upward to the "Top of the World" highway at the Canadian border.  And it is all dirt and gravel.  In fact there are about 80 miles of gravel between Tok and Dawson City in the Yukon, a total distance of 185 miles with most of it from Chicken to the border.  Gravel and a GoldWing, two-up with a trailer is an interesting experience.  The trailer tends to push the rear of the Wing around as it bumps along from one rock to another, especially going downhill.  But the views as we ran along the ridge top were spectacular.  Too bad I couldn't spend more time looking at the view.  I was busy concentrating on the road and picking my route through the gravel and sharp rocks.  Finally the border and the road was paved again, but only in places, there were long stretches of gravel yet to go.

Dawson city and the famous Klondike Creek was the destination of the gold miners.  After Skagway and the Chilkoot Pass they built boats and floated down the Yukon River.  When we arrived at Dawson City we were across the river from the city and had to ride the ferry across.  The river is very swift and keeps washing the banks away.  There is no ferry dock, just a place flattened out by a Cat and the ferry nosed into it.  You loaded and unloaded with a bump!

Dawson City is a partial tourist partial ghost town with dirt streets and wooden sidewalks.  Everybody lives off the tourists.  We spent two nights and the day in between here.  The day was Dirk's birthday and we had plans to take him out for the evening.  We took him to Diamond Tooth Gerties' Saloon and let him watch the dancing girls.

We got there too late to sit downstairs, we ended up in the balcony.  Dirk later said he was glad that happened because as part of the show the girls came down to the floor and picked customers to join the show and Dirk didn't want to be part of the show.  I agree with him, I wouldn't want to be up on the stage either!  Even with those pretty girls!!!

But before the dancing girls we had visited a huge dredge that had worked the side valleys of the Yukon River near Dawson City.  We had an interesting tour through it led by the Canadian National Park Service.  It was electric powered and worked the area from the turn of the 20th century until the 1950's.  It floated in a small pond of water scooping up the ground in front of it, processing the gold out of the dirt and gravel and then depositing the debris behind it.  This way the pond moved forward and it could move up the valley.  It averaged about a mile a year in distance.  It processed about $8,000,000 of gold, hardly enough to pay for itself.  The huge metal parts were made in Ohio and transported to Dawson City with great difficulty.  Then it took all of one working season to put it together before it could even start working.

Robert Service and Jack London are both famous authors that started out a miners in the Klondike gold rush.  Neither were successful as miners and each turned to writing about their adventures.  The cabins where each of them lived are now open and the interiors are furnished as if they were still living there.  Robert Service's cabin even had a local who would read his works to the audience.

From Dawson City it was on to Whitehorse and the Alaskan Highway again.  After some more stretches of gravel, some short but many were miles long, we arrived in Whitehorse.  I had developed a bubble on my front tire where a rock had split the cords and air was raising a place on the tread.  And the trailer tires are about worn out.  The Taylor-Klondike Highways are not for the faint of heart.  The road does not have the very sharp switchbacks of the mountain roads in Europe.  It is actually quite easy to ride, except for the gravel.  And the scenery and history are above average.  On Sunday I went to town and bought one trailer tire and had it installed and then we moved the spare to the other side, moving the worn tire to the spare.  On Monday we wanted to leave so Dirk and I are at the Honda shop when it opens.  They have a tire for me and Dirk goes back and packs camp while I get it installed.  Then we are on the road again headed southeast on the Alaskan Highway.

We are headed to milepost zero.  Click to continue.