In Search of the Midnight Sun - Chapter 7

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(Note: It appears today that TravelBlog is having problems with the pictures showing up on their website. I hope they recitify the problem and they will show up for you.)
n Search of the Midnight Sun - Chapter 7
The Road from the Kenai to Dawson City - August 16/17 2008
We headed back up out of the Kenai Penninsula, through Anchorage and onto the Glenn Highway eastbound for Glenallen. The drive was another spectacular Scenic Byway - lots of curves and cliffs. I told Larry “just drive and I’ll look”. I think he peeks once in a while and I have a hard time not watching the road - it’s hard when you are used to back seat driving. Or as an old fellow from Arizona told us “my wife does all the driving. I just steer.”
From Glenallen we took the Tok Cutoff (that is what the highway is called) back up through Tok to Dawson City. At Tok we crossed our path from when we headed west to Fairbanks a couple of weeks ago. You cannot go into or out of Alaska by road without going through Tok.
We stayed overnight at Tok (pronounced as in Tokyo). I read it was named when it was a construction camp for the building of the Alaska Highway. The US built the highway very quickly during WWII when it looked like the Japanese could attack the western mainland of North America. The Japanese actually did take an island in the Aleutians, which is part of Alaska so there was combat between the US and Japanese in the Aleutians during WWII. That is another little bit of Alaskan history for you. However, I later read the town was named after a sled dog named Tok. Who knows?
On Sunday the 17th we drove from Tok to Dawson City a distance of about only 185 miles. But, it took us most of the day due to road conditions and for our lunch stop in Chicken enroute. The road to Chicken was good but they had a massive forest fire two years ago and the trees were burned almost the entire way. The burnt trees were underlain with red fireweed. We thought the area was ugly and beautiful at the same time. The fireweed was turning red - that is the plant with the beautiful pink flowers we’ve seen everywhere and I think there is a picture earlier in the blog. The plant loses its flower and turns a beautiful red. This area is permafrost again and the spruce trees are all small, skinny and sickly looking even when they aren’t burned. Apparently, the roots can only go down as far as the permafrost and sometimes they look tipsy - moving with the freeze and thaw of the permafrost. That is what the roads do too and they are like a roller coaster with dips and continual road construction sights. We’re sure glad we don’t have the fifth wheel. On guy told us in Anchorage he thought he’d have to put $15,000 into his unit to fix it after driving the roads here.
We arrived in Chicken, Alaska at lunchtime. It has a population of 6 in winter and 20 to 30 in summer. They have no services, and rely on generators for power. The name again is interesting. It started as a mining supply post and the miners wanted to name it ptarmigan for the bird in the area that looks like a chicken. But they couldn’t spell ptarmigan so they named the town Chicken. It’s an interesting little place. We had lunch there - chicken soup of course.
The road from Chicken to Dawson City is called “top of the world”. In fact the drive of about 107 miles is across the top of a mountain range. It’s mostly hard packed clay with a little pavement closer to Dawson. We were prepared as we had a few other travelers tell us about it. It is narrow with soft shoulders as it winds its way around the mountains. As the milepost book says “if you are meeting oncoming traffic and have any doubt, stop.” We didn’t meet much traffic. It is actually a very beautiful drive in the upper alpine area of the mountains with few trees and the grasses and shrubs were turning a beautiful red, rust and gold already in the middle of August. At one pull off, people had built small inukshuks.
Only as we neared Dawson did we descend into a valley where we had to cross the mighty Yukon River on a ferry to get into the town. The road from Tok to Dawson City is closed in the winter.

Dawson City and back to Whitehorse - August 18,19,20, 2008
We are back in the gold rush era of 1898/99. The city has preserved many of its buildings and history for tourism and heritage. It is a very picturesque old town. We arrived on Sunday of the Yukon’s long weekend - Discovery Days - so it was a rockin’ place downtown. It looked to us like they have maintained the Klondike days atmosphere very well. Some of the characters we saw looked to be straight from the mine. But I guess you have to be of hardy character to live here especially in the winter.
On this morning, we did a historical walk with a Parks Canada guide in period costume. It’s a great way to see the town and get a lot of history at the same time. We later walked ourselves to see Robert Service’s cabin and the house where Pierre Berton spent the first 12 years of his life. We have been listening as we drive to a couple cd’s we bought of Robert Service poetry. Besides his famous poems “The Cremation of Sam McGee” and “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” some of his poetry is really humorous. I have also been reading Pierrie Berton’s book “Klondike” which has all the back ground and stories of the gold rush so being here has brought it all to life.
The visit to Dawson City was complete with the evening spent at Diamond Tooth Gerties Saloon.

In case you are wondering, I haven’t mentioned the Northern Lights that are so beautiful here in the Yukon and Alaska. Well, we haven’t seen any. There are two reasons for that. One, it never gets really dark here in the summer so they don’t show up, and two, we have had almost continual cloud. Our weather hasn’t been bad, that is it hasn’t rained except for a few scattered showers and it’s been cool which is good in that we haven’t had any bugs.
Also here is our understanding about the economy and tourism in Alaska and the Yukon this year. It has been a slow year for tourism. We asked a few business and RV campground owners if it was due mainly to the price of fuel. They weren’t sure but thought that the slowdown of the US economy was a big factor. They also said they are still getting the normal numbers of Canadian and European and Asian tourists. And there are sure a lot of German speaking people around. We did our walking tour with a couple from Germany this morning who said gas there costs $2.50 a litre so they think it is cheap here. Travel in the US is also a better bargain for Canadians with the dollar exchange now near equal. For us, it meant a great trip without traffic or crowds. Our license plate count is at 45 states seen, 7 provinces, 2 territories and at least 4 out of country. The out of country plates were hard to tell where they were from but they were narrower and wider than ours and we think one was Switzerland, two Germany and one New Zealand.
On the 20th, we drove from Dawson City to Whitehorse arriving in time to enjoy the Takhini hotsprings about 12 km out of Whitehorse. We’ll spend tomorrow in Whitehorse doing a bit of shopping, laundry, wash the truck and camper and have a golf game. Then on the 21st we’ll start our journey home.
This has been one big trip. So far we have gone 5,000 miles or 8,037 km and will put on at least 2000 km more before we get home. We decided it would be good to do as two separate trips if one had the funds, time and inclination. One nice trip would be to see the gold rush areas of Skagway, Whitehorse and Dawson City. Skagway is in Alaska but is close to Whitehorse and ties in with the gold rush. Alaska itself would be another great trip to see her glaciers, mountains and rivers, parks and scenic drives and a little more of the inside passage than we saw.
We will begin to retrace our path to home, so this blog is now at its END. Thanks for reading and if you enjoyed it please let us know and if we can be of assistance to anyone’s trip planning we’d be glad to help.
Larry & Pat

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Photos

This is muskeg country
It's beautiful here but much is spindly trees and swampy.

Fireweed comes first after a burn
It makes the ugly beautiful!

On Top of the World Highway
the colors are turning already in the middle of August this far north and this high up.

On Top of the World Highway
it sure doesn't look as far down in a picture.

Inside the Red Feather Saloon
we're on a tour - honest!

Hotels in Dawson City
you could actually still get a room.