Dawson City, YT to Chicken, AK Via The Top of the World Highway

After over a week spent in Dawson City, YT the Top of the World Highway border crossing finally opened at 9:00am on Friday, 5/20/11.  We got everything ready to travel and headed down to the ferry launch.  Our ferry is on it’s way to our side of the Yukon River.

We’re loaded onto the ferry and ready to cross the river.

We’re almost to the other side.

The ferry has landed on the other side of the river and we wait for cars to unload before we can move.

Unlike the tractor with the crawler hoe we watched the other day, we off loaded without any problems and they didn’t need to place any boards beneath our tires at all.  We’re off the ferry and headed on over the Top of the World Highway.

Here are a couple of photos as we travel the Top of the World Highway.  This one shows how good the road can be.

And this one shows a rougher patch of road.

The green buildings are the Canadian/US border buildings.  We passed through without any problems.

After a little over three hours on the road, we arrived at Chicken, Alaska for the night.  Here are a couple of photos from the town of Chicken.

 

 

In our travels today, we only saw one snowshoe rabbit.  We didn’t have enough fuel to comfortably get to Tok, so we did take on some diesel at town of Chicken and that gave us a free boondocking campsite for the night.  Chicken is just gearing up for the tourist season and we helped them initiate their credit card processing equipment.  We spent some time in the afternoon to collect some diamond willow, had a beer at the Chicken Saloon, and are now back at camp for the evening.  Tomorrow we plan to drive to Tok where we will probably stay for 2-3 nights.

Dawson City Museum

I called the Visitor’s Center this morning to double check on the opening of the Top of the World Highway in hopes that it would open today.  That was not the case, but it will open Friday morning at 9:00am.  We’re definitely ready to be on the move again.  We did drop by the Visitor’s Center after lunch to double check the date and time, and it’s still set for Friday.  They did mention that the Dawson City Museum was open this afternoon, so we decided to check it out as it’s about the only thing we haven’t done here.  The next three photos were taken in the museum and depict scenes during the gold rush era.  Several of the displays used mannequins, and we found it interesting that in the written description of the scene, they had a notation as to who was the model for the hands.  Ken said it was probably something to get the community to take an active part in the museum.

 

 

When we first arrived in Dawson city there weren’t any buses parked on this lot, but the cruise lines do a major tourist business in Canada and Alaska and are moving in to get ready for the season.

We got a kick out of the caption on this bus:  “Wrong Coach”

 

We will be on the road again tomorrow morning and headed for our next destination of Chicken, Alaska.  Dennis and Carol, Don and Sharon, and Larry and Marilyn, we’ll let you know the road conditions tomorrow after we get there.  We may not have cell phone service there, but it will be nice to be able to turn my Droid on again and be able to use all the great apps I have installed on it.  And, I’ll probably be soon getting out Alaska by James Michener for my summer read while traveling through the state.