Chicken anyone???

Greetings from Chicken. We just arrived in Chicken, Alaska. We are at the Goldpanners Campground where you can drycamp for free if you fill up with gas there. This is the last gas before Canada and is the only gas in town so it isn’t that bad a deal.

We left Homer at the last pitstop of the Watkins Glenn Race. We wouldn’t be there for the end so we picked a point near checkout time and checked out. The sky weeped to see us leave. In fact, it weeped to see us arrive and to see us stay in Homer every day we were there (as well as a few days before we arrived. The Kenai Peninsula is noted for its rainy weather but that was more like being at Bremerton in their winter than anything else. It may not rain all day but it rained pretty steadily and then would let up. When you saw it stop, you would head out to do something and as soon as you got a half mile from the camper, it would start up again.

We camped at a National Forest Site that night (in the rain) then headed into Anchorage the next morning. We went to the Anchorage Art and History Museum. These were the tickets that we got with the Indian Cultural Center tickets. We drove to the museum but found that there were no places to park our battleship. I had read somewhere that there was a parking lot where you could park an RV for $5 a day. Luckily enough, we found it about 4 blocks down (first try). They had several exhibits there. The first was an exhibit on Raptors (birds of prey). A really nice exhibit with lots of stuffed birds and explanations of how they lived and what problems they had in todays world. In another set of rooms, they had art exhibits from a series of painters and sculptors who specialized in Alaskan art. They had a room of photographs taken in western Alaska. Upstairs, they had historical exhibits portraying the history of Alaska from each of the groups of tribes of natives to various explorations of the area by Russians, Italians and Lewis & Clark. They showed how the state evolved through the gold rushes and the development of the 2 still existing railroads, statehood and the 1964 earthquake. I remember that one because Jane Hussey ( or someone in that class) had a relative living up there when it hit. It was a really nice place and instead of the 90 minutes we expected to spend there, we were there for 5 hours. We wandered around downtown for a while after we left there looking for either something else to do or salmon and found neither.

We headed north again but decided that we wanted to see the Zoo of Alaska (also in Anchorage) so we grabbed the first campground we came to at Eagle River. This was one of the nicest state campgrounds we found. All the sites were paved (parking areas, tents had grassy or gravely areas). There was a raging grey (glacial silt) river on the grounds with a really nice trail along it. We walked along the trail (in the rain of course) and viewed the river from several banks upstream.

The next morning, we got a bright and early start (for us at least, we seem to be staying in bed later and later….its getting dark around here again). The zoo is noted for specializing in arctic animals. They had wolf cubs, coyotes, brown bears, black bears, polar bears, moose, caribou, a nice selection of hawks and owls and a couple of exotics (snow leopard and Siberian tigers). Oh, yes, they also had an elephant. Why an elephant in an Alaskan zoo?? The elephant started the zoo. A woman iin Anchorage won a contest where the top prize was an elephant or a sum of money. The perpetrators were sure the winner would elect the money rather than an elephant but this woman fooled them and wanted the elephant. They searched high and low and finally found a baby elephant that had been in a circus. She boarded it with a friend and eventually they had to do something with it so a group of people bought 5 acres of land and started this zoo. Most of the arctic animals are there because they are no longer capable of liviin in the wild. There is a lynx that was hit by a car and had to have a leg amputated (her name was mary not tripod) and a young pair whose parents were killed and who will be reintroduced into the wild when they are a little older. An owl had only one eye and could not hunt. Well you get the picture. While it was a great place to see animals up close, it was sad that so noble a group of animals were no longer capable of living in the wild and had to be caged (or die). Oh, by the way, it rained the whole time we were at the zoo.

On the way north, we stopped at the Portage Glacier visitor center and on the way out, there was a salmon viewing area. There was a nice deck where you could watch the salmon swimming up stream. At the time we were there, there were 4 kinds of salmon in the water there. I never thought that they had to share the streams with other kinds of salmon. Oh, I also found a spot to buy salmon. We have had it a couple of nights in a row. Grilled salmon salads. One of my favorites.

We arrived in Palmer in early afternoon, got our mail package and did some food shopping. Now, with the larders bulging, we were ready to return to the wild!! We headed out on the road to Glenallen and drove until 9:30 when we stopped at a turnout for the night. This morning we passed Glenallen and drove up the Tok Cutoff to Tok. Along the way, we took a rock in the windshield leaving a star crack, had the oil change light come on (800 miles early), had someone stop me and tell me that my spare was about to fall of the camper and got the camper covered in mud (did I mention that it rained all night and into the morning??). a pretty good morningsworth of disasters. Upon reaching Tok, I got the oil changed and learned from the book that there is a light warning that needs to be reset when you change the oil (news to me), I found someone to attempt to fix the windshield without replacing it (it expanded while he was fixiing it but it may hold (he gave us a box of fudge to help us forget that the crack is now 5 inches long vice a little star shot), I found the parts I needed to fix the spare tire and got that hooked back up to the frame and the mud…..well, that I still there because we will be seeing many miles of dirt road over the next few days.

That is how we got to chicken. We will spend part of tomorrow touring the 3 buildings that make up Chicken and heading out onto the dirt roads for the Canadian border. Slow and easy show the way. The scenery is supposed to be worth the effort and I expect we will camp by some river somewhere along the way. All for now.

C2

Just another day in Chicken Alaska. Cheryl woke up this morning and headed out to the gift shop to resupply her post card inventory and check out when the tour of Tisha’s house and schoolhouse. It turns out that the people that run this campground also own the original Town of Chicken. It is now a ghost town since the gold dried up and the company that owned all of the claims pulled out. Tisha is a woman who came here and became the school teacher during the height of activity when Chicken was really a place on the map (it still is but with a population of 15, it ain’t what it used to be. Cheryl came back almost immediately saying that there was only one tour today and it was starting in 5 minutes. I thought we were going to see this old schoolhouse but as we went along, I realized that there was a complete ghost town. There were prospector’s cabins including one that was lived in much later than the others. A prospector’s cabin was quite small. There was a bed, a plate steel barrel type stove, a table and a bureau and not much else. He had a wood shed that was bigger than his house (it gets 50 to 75 below zero around here) and a low chache building where he kept his prospecting supplies. The school building was fairly large and was split in half with living quarters in one side and school in the other. The floor had given out so they put in a new rough sawn floor but put it in over the old floor so you couldn’t open any of the doors any longer (the floor went right over the doors). You could enter the school but had to go back outside to enter the living quarters even though there was a door between them (you couldn’t open it from either side). One of the buildings had sunk into the ground 3 feet (all of the ground here is permafrost. Heat in the buildings melt the permafrost under the buildings and causes the ground to get soft allowing the buildings to sink into the ground) There was a building that had been a store. It had originally had a sod roof. The company that had owned the buildings before our hosts had put metal roofing to protect the buildings. On this building, they put the metal roofing right over the sod roofing so you can see the layer of sod roof between the metal roof and the wood portion under the sod.

There is no electricity in Chicken. There are several generators that provide for corners of the town. The Gold Panner RV Center has one, Chicken Gold camp has one and Chicken Center has one for the stores. I am not sure who provides the post office with electricity but I noticed that they have a gas lights as a backup. Chicken post office is very much the antithesis of South Berwick and Eliot post office. They are friendly and helpful and they even have their own postmark (Chicken, Alaska). They only have mail on Tuesdays and Fridays but you get personal attention. Each item is personally hand stamped before the plane comes in to get it and drop off the new mail delivery. We talked with the postmaster (postmistress?) for quite some time about chicken and the fitness of the world to exist at all. Then we went down the street to Chicken Center and found a post card of the Chicken Post Office with the Postmaster (or postmistress) out in front. It is a small log cabin (and I mean small).

We walked over to the Pedro Dredge (which we can see very plainly out our camper window). It is probably closer to us than any of our neighbors at home. This is the newest entry to the national historic register and is purported to be the most complete dredge anywhere. This thing is as big as a small ship and it works in these small creeks here in Alaska and the Yukon. They have a boom in the front that constantly digs up the creek and conveyors it inside for processing (I don’t know how that works but I think I will be able to tell you more after we reach Dawson City). This one is being restored but is far from being finished. After the processing inside is finished, all of the rocks and debris are conveyored out the back onto a boom that swings from side to side filling in the space that the dredge had dug out of the front. This debris formed a dam which kept water in the space that the dredge floated in between the digging out and the debris dam. That is how a multi-ton barge sized vessel could float up a stream bed that was wayyyy smaller than the size of the dredge. Cool.

Then we walked over to the Chicken Center after getting lost…go figure! 3 stores, a post office, an historic site and 2 campgrounds and we get lost. When you go down the airport road (I did mention that the mail came by air) the road to the dredge turns off and comes back in on the other side of the stores so we missed them and ended up at the airport. Eventually, we found them (you really can’t get too lost here). The Chicken Emporium was rather nicer than I expected but to make up for it, the Chicken Saloon was really sleazy. After the Emporium, we checked out the saloon and the café and ended up sitting on the bench outside the saloon, weighing the benefits of Alaskan Amber vs. pie and ice cream. Then the tour busses hit, two of them at once and we chose quickly knowing that any hesitation would mean we would be left out of either. We belined for the café thinking the pie with ice cream and coffee was the better choice. We walked in the door and the counter was full of pies. There was just enough space to conduct business and choose your pie (apple, blueberry and cherry). They heated the pie and put a nice scoop of vanilla ice cream on it. I didn’t mind the paper plate but the plastic fork and paper coffee cup spoiled the affect. Then the Café was flooded with customers, all with their neat little name tags and their propensity to fill anyplace to overflowing.

We wandered back to our camper and got our gold pan and headed down to the creek. They have some funny rules here about gold panning. They provide a pile of dirt and a branch of a small stream for the guests to use but you have to use their pans (small). We bought our own pan but will have to wait to use it somewhere else. We panned here for a while and Cheryl even pulled out a couple of flakes of gold, met a woman who is a crafter and went in to visit when the rain (rain, remember rain, it was raining when we woke up this morning and has showered several times today). I headed back to start supper and fill you all in on today’s activity.

Tomorrow, we are up early to head off to Dawson City. It is only 108 miles (48 of which are dirt), a ferry across the Yukon River, Canadian Customs and who knows what else. The gentleman (and I use the word loosely) just came out of his airstream trailer and bitched about the noise of our generator (before 8:30) when quiet time is 11:00. He obviously doesn’t have one. My generator is not all that loud. All I was using it for was to play music over the sound system from my Ipod (3,500 songs) and to fuel my computer so in the feeling of neighborlyness, I turned it off 2 ½ hours early and started playing music on my computer (same 3,500 songs) while I write.

Dawson City Tomorrow.

C2