AN ALASKA ROAD TRIP IS A GRAND ADVENTURE!

On my own Alaska Road Trip, I came to the end of the Grand Circle when I drove from Glennallen to Tok. I’d been to Tok once before, on my first day in Alaska, passing through on my way to Fairbanks when I rolled in from the Yukon on the Alaska Highway. That first time, I stopped just long enough for a good breakfast at Fast Eddie’s. This time I stayed the night, and discovered that there was more to Tok than my fleeting first impression.  With a population of almost 1,200, it’s one of Alaska’s larger towns, and it’s beautifully situated, with stunning mountain views of the nearby Alaska Range.

Most Alaska Road Trippers leave the state the same way they came in, on the Alaska Highway. They simply reverse course, and drive from Tok back to the Canadian Border; from there, it’s on to Beaver Creek and points east in the Yukon. That was my original plan, but in the course of my travels, I’d come up with something different. 

Olympic gold!

They also told me that when I left Alaska, I should drive north from Tok to a place called Chicken, and from there, take the Top of the World Highway to Dawson City, across the border in Canada. “If you catch that road on a clear day,” they said, “you can see for a hundred miles. It’s more amazing than anything you’ll see at Denali!” Their tip about the WEIO had been spot on–I sincerely enjoyed what I saw at that event, which was undoubtedly the most “Alaskan” thing that I experienced during all of my time in the state. I figured their ‘Top of the World Highway’ recommendation had to be equally worth my while–but there was going to be chance involved. I’d been warned: that business about catching it on a clear day.

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The Alaska Highway: The Back Road Out

The first 60 miles of the Taylor Highway was paved, if you could call it that. I’d never seen so many frost heaves—sections of road where the pavement has been buckled by expansion and contraction of the water-soaked soil beneath the road bed, which alternately freezes and thaws with the changing seasons. They’re usually marked, but not always; (they say you haven’t really lived until you’ve hit unexpected frost heaves at highway speed). Once that rippled pavement ended, the road pretty well went to the dogs. I’d never seen that many potholes! They would have been better off scraping away the last of asphalt and making a plain dirt road out of it.

The area around Chicken was so foggy I could scarcely see the road at all. Chicken started as a mining camp during the Klondike Gold Rush, and it’s one of the very few such places that is still producing gold more than a century later. The mining operations have scaled back pretty dramatically, such that the primary industry in Chicken, with a permanent population of 12 souls, is tourism. Why call it “Chicken”? When the mining camp grew large enough to need a Post Office, back in 1902, residents had to come up with a name for the place.

They wanted to call their town Ptarmigan, which is the Alaska State Bird. Unfortunately, nobody knew how to spell Ptarmigan, so they settled on Chicken, and that’s what it’s been ever since. The Monumental Chicken sculpture is a relatively recent addition. Known as “Mr. Eggee,” the 12 foot tall barnyard fowl has an internal metal framework overlaid with metal “feathers” cut from recycled school lockers.  A high school welding teacher and his students made the beast for the annual Chickenstock Music Festival, back in 2012, then had it transported 600 miles from Homer to it’s current place of honor, on a hill above the Chicken Gold Camp RV Park.  

The price of gas in Chicken was the highest I’d seen, but I topped up my tank anyway, because there’s a simple truth about the price of fuel in that part of the world: Even the most expensive gas in Alaska is cheaper than any gas in Canada. Significantly higher taxes push Canada’s price at the pump into the stratosphere. Fuel is dispensed by the liter and priced in Canadian Dollars, so while you’re fueling, those dials spin faster than the reels on an old-fashioned slot machine.

Hazy view from the Taylor Highway

The rough dirt road gave way to a newly paved modern highway. This was it, the Top of the World, and right on cue, the haze peeled back, just enough to give me a glimpse of the beauty my friends in Fairbanks assured me would be there:

The view from the Top of the World Highway. Better than Denali? If the clouds had all lifted, who knows?

Poker Creek-Little Gold Creek Customs Post

Just around the bend from the sign was a long, low building painted green, the Poker Creek-Little Gold Creek Customs Post. The United States and Canada share the building, a rare circumstance in the realm of International borders, made even more unusual by the fact that Alaska and the Yukon are in different time zones, meaning one end of the building is an hour ahead of the other; a line painted on the floor marks the border inside the structure. This is a seasonal customs post, in both directions. The border, and by extension, the highway, is open only in the summer months, and only from 8AM to 8PM (Alaska Time); crossings are strictly disallowed outside those hours, and prominent signs make that perfectly clear. My Jeep was the only vehicle in sight, so I didn’t have to get in line, I just rolled up on the building and stopped. After a quick check of my identification, I was welcomed to Canada, no inspection required.

The Top of the World Highway continued east from the border, running along the crest of the ridges. The sky was clear overhead, but still hazy along the horizon, so I never did catch the full benefit of those “Top of the World” views. After 50 or 60 miles, the mostly gravel highway started dropping in elevation. I drove around a curve and stopped at a pullout above a bend in the Yukon River, and there, spread out below me, was the gold rush town of Dawson City, tucked in along the banks of the famous waterway.

George Black Ferry, Dawson City, Yukon

Scenes in and around Dawson City and the Yukon River

Dawson City is an interesting place. It was founded in 1896, on the site of what was once a fishing camp at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers, and by 1898 it had become the primary staging area for thousands of hopeful gold prospectors, seeking their fortunes in the frozen rivers and streams of the Klondike. When the height of the gold fervor ended, in 1899, the population dropped from 16,000 to half that number, but it was still the biggest city in northern Canada, and the capital of the Yukon Territory for more than 50 years. The writer, Jack London, lived in Dawson City in those early years, so many of his most famous stories, including Call of the Wild, are set there.

Today, Dawson City is struggling a bit. When the Alaska Highway was built in the late 1940’s, the route that they chose passed through Whitehorse, missing Dawson by more than 300 miles. To say their economy suffered would be putting it mildly. Whitehorse replaced Dawson as the territorial capital in 1952, and the place went into serious decline. Half a century later, tourism picked up a bit, and because tourists need hotels, restaurants, and numerous services, the old town was at least partially revitalized. Dawson City is a VERY long way from anything else. Four to five hours from Tok via the Top of the World, and at least five hours from Whitehorse on the Klondike Highway.  You have to be reasonably serious about wanting to go there, so they’ve done their best to make it worth your while.

What I found when I passed through was a turn of the century gold rush town—partially restored, partially dilapidated original, hanging on tight to their 19th century ambience. The tourists tended to be senior citizens with RV’s, but among the locals, there were a lot of young people. There seemed to be sort of a hippy type community, mostly Canadians from other parts of the country, with a bit of an art and music scene. I stayed in an extremely funky hotel that was well beyond dilapidated. The floors were literally tilting, in several different directions, as if the building was on the brink of collapse.

The next day, I gassed up my Jeep, and headed south on the Klondike Highway, running parallel to the Yukon River most of the way. I didn’t see that much of the river, since it was mostly hidden by trees. I also didn’t see many other vehicles. In the first half of the drive, I passed two pickup trucks, and after that, I had the entire highway to myself for the next three hours. There wasn’t a single other vehicle, traveling in either direction. In 300 miles, there were no homesteads visible, and almost no towns. It wasn’t exactly desolate, but it had to be the loneliest stretch of highway I’ve ever driven.

This was essentially the same route followed by tens of thousands of desperate men during the gold rush, overland to the Yukon from the coast of Alaska, then up the Yukon River, by boat when it wasn’t frozen, and by any means possible the rest of the year. I tried to imagine it, just a bit more than a hundred years before, and it brought to mind the poems of Robert Service, the bard of the Yukon, who lived most of his life in Whitehorse. There was one poem of his that has always stuck in my mind. It’s a tale told in verse, about two men traveling the Dawson Trail in the dead of winter. One of them succumbs to the bitter cold, but before he dies, he extracts a promise from his partner:

“I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you’ll cremate my last remains.”

The rest of the poem, The Cremation of Sam McGee. provides explicit details about the difficult execution of that task, but what’s always stayed with me is the first stanza:

Lake Leberge, just outside Whitehorse, Yukon

Toward the end of my drive that day, just outside of Whitehorse, I saw a turnoff, and a sign beside the road that read Lake Leberge Campground. I followed the dirt road for maybe half a mile, until I came to a picnic area, on the shores of a large, deep blue lake. I got out of the Jeep and just stood there for a bit, surveying the scene; beautiful, but with the overcast skies and no other people around, it was a bit cold and desolate, even in summer.

“Son of a bitch,” I said to myself. “I’ll be damned if I’m not standing on the marge of Lake Lebarge.”

The actual  Lake Leberge (which Service spelled “Lebarge,” to fit his rhyme) is actually a widening of the Yukon River that runs for 50 miles, and extends as much as five miles across. The whole thing freezes solid in the winter. Quite apart from its claim to fame in old poetry, it’s a popular recreation area for Whitehorse residents, and I could certainly see why.

Arriving back in Whitehorse was borderline surreal. I’d stayed the night there on my way to Alaska, and that first time through, the town seemed like an exotic, remote outpost, a place you could only get to after days on the road. The remote aspect was still true, but this time, because it seemed so familiar, it almost felt like home, or at least, the first step on the road back home. I’d been traveling for 39 days, and I was still at least 3,000 miles away from the end of the trip. My plan was to rendezous with a buddy who was flying up to meet me in Edmonton, and then we’d travel back south together, following the Rockies through the Canadian National Parks and on into Montana, Wyoming, and Utah. All of that went very well! If you’d like to read about it, start here: Canadian Road Trips: Rolling through the Rockies.

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Some of the text and many of the photos in my Alaska Highway series first appeared on RoadTrip America’s website. A few years ago, I posted a detailed account of my entire 57 day, 13,000 mile “Mother of All Road Trips,” and RTA has kept that account available in their archive of Field Reports. If you’d like to read it, the link below will take you there:

MORE ABOUT THE ALASKA HIGHWAY:

This is an interactive Table of Contents. Click the pictures to open the pages.

Alaska Road Trip

A few years ago I wrote a book about road trips in Arizona and New Mexico that’s a lot like this website, packed with interesting information, and illustrated with beautiful photographs. Check it out! You can find it on Amazon, and at all other major booksellers.