Chickens, Gold and Whitehorse

The town of Chicken is 'perched' on the Top of the World Highway - a mostly unpaved road which is only open in summer. The nearest towns are 100 km in one direction and 150 km in the other.  But every year Chicken hosts a bluegrass music festival called “Chicken Stock”! Chicken has a permanent population of 23, but for the music festival this swelled to 1500. Scaling that up it is like 3 million people turning up for Womad in New Plymouth! It all went without a hitch – a great family atmosphere with continuous music from 11 am-2.00 am on a stage that used to be an old chicken coop propped up between two vintage trucks.

We went with no expectations and mainly because of the name. Chicken does not take itself too seriously. Apparently it is called Chicken because the early miners couldn’t spell Ptarmigan (the state bird). Chicken puns abounded, the “chicken dance” was compulsory, the music great, the weather amazing and our campsite neighbours super-friendly. Just as well because the ‘parking Nazi’ sure jammed us all in. Once parked, our ‘patch’ was circled with fluro spray paint, leaving just enough room to open doors at the side and place chairs at the back. On the final morning as we were packing to leave and exchanging addresses with our new ‘close’ friends, a moose momma appeared from the nearby trees with her twin calves. She looked at us as if to say “they said you'd all be gone by now!’ and promptly walked her babies between the vans, scattering chicken stockers in all directions. We all know not to mess with the Mumma!

From Chicken it was onward over the Top of the World highway towards Dawson City in the Yukon. This highway lives up to its name – a good but unpaved road tracking the tops of the hills with uninterrupted views in all directions. We camped the night right alongside the highway. This was in line with our current policy of not driving very far in a day, taking frequent nana naps and going to bed at a ridiculously late hour because the dam sun won’t set. It was remote, wild and beautiful with no traffic as the border post closed at night and didn’t open again until the morning.

Dawson City is on the confluence Yukon and Klondike Rivers. There is no road bridge over the Yukon here, but there is a free 24 hr ferry across the fast- flowing river. The town is full of history as it was the site of the Klondike gold rush. The local first-nation population were displaced by the hordes of gold seekers who arrived, only to find that most of the gold-bearing streams were already staked. Many of the old buildings have been retained and restored and there are strict building codes for new buildings to keep the ‘frontier’ style. It boasts an excellent information centre, great walking tour, museum and numerous cafes and restaurants.

June 14 would have been Kathy’s 32^nd birthday. It was difficult being so far away from home and I was a bit teary.  Definitely not what Kathy would want! So we pulled ourselves together and hit the town to celebrate her birthday. At Diamond Tooth Gertie’s Casino we watched two rounds of the show girls then Dave gambled and lost a $20 fortune on the Blackjack table while I squandered $7 at the bar! Next day we tried to win our lost fortune back by gold panning at local public claim. We even took some panning lessons first, but to no avail and 3 hours later all we had was wet feet, sore backs and no gold! But it was all good fun.

Back on the road our next destination was Whitehorse, 532 km away – and true to our travel style, involved two overnight stops along the way. Whitehorse is the capital of the Yukon, with a population of about 30,000. It is also on the Yukon River and was the base for the paddle steamers which ferried freight and people up and down from Dawson City. At one time there were dozens of paddle steamers plying the river. RV tourists are the new stampede and we parked ourselves for two nights in a big Walmart parking lot along with at least 40 other vans. We took full advantage of the two beautiful sunny days, hiking and biking along the waterfront and enjoyed a very pleasant Father’s Day meal at a riverside restaurant.

It has suddenly dawned on us that we only have 20 days left before we have to have the van back in Calgary. Time to quit the nana naps and get some kilometers under our belt – 2,300 of them to be exact!

Easy to guess where this is!

Our parking nazi - she takes bribes!

Our Chicken Stock compere - he did a great job

The stage was an old chicken coup

Moose Momma and twins - she looks determined!

Our camp neighbours

New friends from Fairbanks and Anchorage

A couple of old relics

Front Street, Dawson City

Dawson on the Yukon

Whitehorse waterfront

Out biking in Whitehorse

Fine weather again - drifting, Alyeska and Anchorage

A spell of wet weather sure does make you appreciate the sunny days when they return and we made full use of them. Our first stop was at the small settlement of Cooper Landing on the Kenai River. Jenni’s friend Travis is a fishing guide in Cooper Landing, and although the fishing season was not yet under way, he offered us a float down the river in his ‘drift’ boat. No motors allowed on this section of the Kenai so we drifted down this quite fast flowing river with Travis at the oars negotiating the occasional rapids. We brought along a bottle of NZ white and Travis supplied the cheese and crackers and coffee. A beautifully relaxing way to spend an evening.

Still keeping an eye on the weather forecast we headed towards Anchorage stopping overnight (in the RV) at the Alyeska Resort. We took ourselves up the tramway to the top of Mt Alyeska at 2,300 ft. and enjoyed an early birthday dinner in the posh restaurant at the top. Fantastic views for miles in all directions – a great night. More bear sightings too – a mother and two cubs as we went up the tramway and a very guilty looking black bear scavenging in a dumpster in town.

The beautiful views and fine weather continued as we drove back to Anchorage along Cook Inlet and settled ourselves once again at Cabela’s store parking lot. This time in Anchorage we were able to take down the bikes and pedal the long coastal trail into town, explore a weekend market and visit Earthquake Park. The 1964 earthquake in Anchorage must have been truly terrifying. It was magnitude 9.2 (Kaikoura was 7.8), the second most powerful ever recorded, and generated huge tsunamis which wiped out several coastal towns and were responsible for most of the deaths. In Seward, where we stayed earlier, the first tsunami ruptured oil tanks on the waterfront setting the water ablaze. The next even bigger wave carried in a huge tide of fire ashore.

We have now moved on from Anchorage on our way north to Chicken and the music festival. It is not going to be a fast trip as it is only 636 km and we have 5 days to get there. At the moment we are sitting in a café in Palmer with good wifi. Our day's travelling plans are slowed down as we have just been joined by a nine-piece bluegrass band and we will sit and enjoy the music! For the first time, the blog is up-to-date and in real time!!

Beautiful Cooper Landing 

Our boat barister

The second mate

Russian River Ducks (taken by Travis)

Birthday bar view

View from  Mt Alyeska up Cook Inlet

Dumpster diver!

A change in the weather

In Fairbanks the weather was so mild it became obvious we had under-catered for summer, so splashed out in Walmart and bought teeshirts and mosquito repellent. Balmy days in Talkeetna meant we got to wear the teeshirts and use the repellent on the giant-sized mozzies. But that all changed once we headed to Anchorage and the Kenai Penninsular.

Only 3 fine days in the last 10 – and even they were cold with a bitter wind, necessitating stowing the teeshirts and hauling out puffer jackets, raincoats and umbrellas. It meant that in Anchorage we stayed indoors exploring the museums and indoor malls, and lunched at The Hard Rock Café (baby boomers aye!). Anchorage’s spacious parks will have to wait until we return next week. Overnight parking was free at an amazing hunting, fishing and sports store called Cabela’s. Their amazing décor included two full-sized bull moose at battle, a piper cub aeroplane suspended from the ceiling, numerous other stuffed animals and a huge fireplace with leather armchairs to relax in. Very impressive. If you live in Alaska you fish! And hunt. It’s what everyone does – and in season they stock their freezers with salmon, halibut, trout and moose meat. Canned salmon in the supermarket is hard to come by and is expensive – everyone here catches their own or knows someone who does.

The weather forecast was better in Homer at the southernmost tip of the Kenai Penninsular so we headed south. Homer is a cute little fishing town with a long spit that extends out into Katchemak Bay in Captain Cook Inlets. Shops and restaurants are dotted along the spit on piles over the water – and dozens of small boats. All very cute and not too touristy. Most memorable thing was the excellent fish chowder on a wet and windy day.

The road back up the peninsular to Kenai follows the coast and gave us beautiful views across the inlet to four recently active volcanoes in the Aleutian Chain – all of them around 3000 m. At our beach side camping spot enroute we hung out with 30 or so bald eagles fishing in the river and waiting with the seagulls on the beach for low tide. Mt Illiama looks a bit like Mt Taranaki and the huge rocks of coal on the beach was a novelty!

Moose are making up the majority of our wildlife count. We no longer stop and photograph the ones on the side of the road as we drive by. But the one that wandered into the middle of the path as we were out walking stopped us in our tracks. We felt a lot less brave without our trusty vehicle to shelter in. The pregnant cows are big are bad-tempered at this time of year. We did get up close and personal with brown bears at another wildlife refuge just out of Anchorage, but at our present campsite in Seward, it is the very cute sea otters in the harbour that are entertaining us.

It is Memorial Weekend this weekend and Seward has a cruise ship- visiting as well as LOTS of RVs. Unfortunately the constant rain has meant that people are mostly confined to indoors. Our RV is small and we have decamped to the laundromat and a coffee shop to avoid hut fever – but pity the family parked next to us with two (wet) children two (wetter) dogs in their RV!

Next stops are a trip up the Kenai River in a drift boat, a birthday dinner atop the lift at Alyeska Ski Resort, and a music festival in a town called Chicken.  Guess what the festival is called – why Chicken Stock of course!

Cabela's interior

Homer boat harbour

Looks like Mt Taranaki - bald eagles on the beach and the black rock is coal

Fine, but really cold wind at our camp in Deep Creek

Halibut catch in Seward - huge flatfish

Very laid back and cute sea otter - Seward harbour

Denali

Denali National Park is a huge, scenic, wild life preserve covering nearly 25,000 square kilometres. That's 40 times bigger than Lake Taupo or over half the size of the North Island, and in its centre is Denali, the highest mountain in North America. It used to be called Mt McKinley (after a US president who never actually visited Alaska – sound familiar?).  However, in 2015, amid rejoicing from the Alaskans and (of course), opposition from Republicans, Barak Obama changed its name to Denali. To the Athabascan Indians this means ‘the high one’. And it certainly is one big chunk of rock. Standing at 6,190 metres, it has its own weather system and is more often than not, shrouded in cloud.

But we were lucky! We were lucky to get fine clear weather and lucky to be able to visit before the park officially opened for the summer. This meant that staying in the campground was free and every day we were able to drive ourselves 30 miles into the park on the only road, In 'the season' it is only possible to travel through the park by bus but having our own wheels gave us freedom and we loved it.

Because the area is so large and for most of the year animals have it to themselves, they don’t seem at all disturbed by motor vehicles or people. Although were not so great at wildlife spotting at first, we found if we stayed late, cooking our dinner while deep in the park and just sat waiting with binoculars, or drove very slowly along the road, the wildlife showed itself. Moose, caribou, dall sheep, ptarmigan and porcupine – we were able to ogle them all with Mac’s brilliant binoculars. Our best sighting though, was a big, dark wolf which passed close by as we sat outside the van eating our dinner. He looked like a huge, wary Alsatian. Unfortunately our little cameras could not reproduce the view in the binoculars so no brilliant wildlife photographs I am afraid.

We hiked high into the hills above the tree line with just sheep in the distance and little arctic squirrels darting around. The views were stunning. We learned later that the hungry grizzlies like to hang out there also, digging those cute little arctic ground squirrels from their burrows! Fortunately we can’t be much of a culinary delight to a grizzly as we never saw one and that bear spray is still unused! 

First world problems still plagued us though – no cellphone reception past Mile 6 in the park and we had run out of ground coffee!! This meant an emergency trip to the only coffee shop open – Starbucks in the Denali Princess Lodge. That latte with an extra shot and the free wifi soothed those caffeine and data addictions.

Eventually though we had to leave Denali and headed south towards the quaint little town of Talkeetna. After five days without a shower we felt we deserved a proper campground and celebrated our outer cleanliness with a lovely meal in town. It felt so good!

Next up – the big city of Anchorage and exploring the Kenai Penninsular.

Denali - the big white in the middle!

Hiking the trails

We climbed to the top of that!

The quaint town of Talkeetna

Out biking in Talkeetna - Denali in the background

North in Alaska - Haines to Fairbanks

From Haines to Fairbanks is 1030 km and Google maps told us we could drive it in 12 hours and 23 minutes! As if!! It took us five days and four overnight stops. These stops were certainly varied and included a remote rural airstrip in Burwash Landing and the back of a Chevron station in Tok (rhymes with poke). We enjoyed a meal at a fishing lodge next door to our State Park camp at Delta Junction and on our way back to the van discovered a young moose resting on a path just below us. Most memorable though, was the beautiful frozen lake surrounded by woods, complete with cabin and roaring log fire. It was very fittingly called Kathleen Lake and so forever now in our minds it is Kathy’s Lake. We had our first bear siting here too as a young grizzly walked across the ice. Unfortunately we were not quick enough with the camera.

We drove through hundreds of miles of spruce forest – but it was a ragged, ‘drunken’ sort of forest. The permafrost and very poor soil means that trees are shallow rooted, have sparse foliage and seem to be on a drunken lean. In addition, warmer temperatures have meant a proliferation of spruce bark beetle which has devastated thousands of acres of spruce forest leaving hillsides covered in dead trees – fuel for the hundreds of forest fires which rage during the summer, usually caused by lightning strike. It probably seemed more bleak because the cottonwood and birch trees that line the road were not yet in leaf.

The driver though, was required to keep eyes on the road to look out for ‘frost heave’. In winter damp soil freezes and forms mounds, often splitting the tarseal and causing large hummocks which bounce everything around in the van. This happens everywhere there is permafrost (so nearly every highway in Alaska and Yukon) and there is no shortage of work for highway maintenance crews repairing the roads every spring.

We were pleased to reach Fairbanks and were greeted by the howl of half a dozen airforce Tomcat jets flying past us at Eielson Airforce Base. However, they were nothing compared to the mosquitoes that greeted us at the provincial park we planned to stay at! They are huge! We abandoned that idea and headed for the city. We didn’t even stop at the Santa Clause House in North Pole on the outskirts. It was right next to the motorway, had lost all its snow and just looked a bit tacky as we sped by.

Fairbanks is the second largest city in Alaska and home to a large army and airforce base and the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus. It is spread out, designed for cars and does not really seem to have a ‘centre’. Most shopping is done in a couple of malls. Because of the climate, buildings seem to be lacking in windows and really the only architect-designed buildings we saw were the university buildings high on the hill. 

Once oriented though we enjoyed our stay. The University of Alaska Museum of the North is magnificent as is the display at the Visitor and Cultural Centre. We stayed at Pioneer Park, a historic theme park which allows RV parking in the carpark area and cycled along the river into town. We visited an outstanding antique car museum, walked for miles in a waterfowl sanctuary and treated ourselves to a cruise in a paddle steamer up the Chena River. It was the first day of the season and we shared it with three bus loads of cruise boat tourists.  A sign of crowds to come as summer approaches! Neverthess, we enjoyed the afternoon and even had our photo taken in a room where the temperature was -60F degrees! Didn’t hang about in there!

The College Coffee House close to the university became our home away from home though – great wifi, good coffee, friendly staff and comfy leather armchairs. We could imagine that on those -40 degrees winter days with the fire roaring, it would be a popular place to hang out. They even had a regular gathering of ‘good old boys’ – just like Ozone in NP! 

Beautiful Kathy's Lake

View from cabin  at Kathy's Lake - bear walked across the lake

Our airfield camp - views aren't too bad!

Dead spruce on the hillsides

Border between Yukon and Alaska

Sled dog transport - mushing is big up here!

Our first moose!

University of Alaska Fairbanks Museum

Blue Babe - 36,000 year old steppe bison preserved in permafrost

Getting ready to do our tourist thing

Note the temperature - yup it was cold!

Car museum

The last of the inside passage - Juneau to Haines

The Mendenhall Glacier is the premier tourist must do in Juneau – and it doesn’t disappoint. Just 15 minutes’ drive from the city, it is big and white and it has little bergs floating off it. As an added bonus a beaver paddled his way around in the lake for us. We were able to walk along a woodland track to the face of the glacier then back along the sand beach. We looked up and high in a tree top was a female black bear and her two cubs. Our first wild bear sighting – so exciting - and we clicked away with our cameras. But Oh the disappointment when our best shots showed just a small back blob. Wildlife photographers we ain’t!

Up to this point our RV has been very reliable but on the way back to town it started to miss. This presented a problem as it was 3 pm and we were to sail on the ferry to Skagway early next morning. After being sent from one garage to another and phone calls to Cruise Canada, we eventually found an obliging mechanic who put the scanner on it to see what the problem was. It was a faulty spark plug/coil and they managed to find the hour required to replace it for us. Apparently if it had been a plug on a different cylinder it would have required the engine to be removed. We were lucky it was that plug, lucky to find such an obliging garage who put other work aside for us and lucky it happened in Juneau rather than on the Alaskan Highway with miles and miles between towns.

Skagway, our next port of call, is the historic “Gateway to the Klondike”. Countless fortune-seekers (and many planning to relieve them of it!) made their way here during the Alaska gold rush. They had to prepare themselves for the tortuous trip over the Chilkoot or the White Pass. The Canadian Government determined each person going to Dawson from Skagway needed 3lb of food per day for a whole year. So food alone weighed in at a half a ton and many trips up and back down were required to transport all their gear up the steep slopes. An excellent display in the Parks building gave a graphic account of life for goldminers and others who made their way to the town. A railway and a road goes over White Pass now. We drove - it was a beautiful winter wonderland at the top and impossible to imagine how after surviving the climb through the pass, anybody would have had the ability to crash through bush for another 500 miles to reach the goldfields.

Skagway has kept its old buildings and boardwalks and now relies on the stampede from thousands of cruise ship visitors who start arriving in town from the beginning of May. We attended the season kick-off party for locals and the large number of college kids from the lower 48 states who come to town to work for the season. There were lots of happy reunions, dancing and (very average) music.

Our tourist thing though was to take a flightseeing trip over Glacier Bay – 3.2 million acres of coastal islands, scenic fiords and the highest concentration of tidewater glaciers on the planet – it was spectacular. Our pilot was a character – he was very pleased to have Kiwis on board because it meant he could safely bad-mouth Donald Trump. We were pleased too as we had been keeping our mouths firmly shut for the past few weeks at the sight of Trump/Pence stickers on the back of utes!

Haines was our last ferry stop. It was a dull, overcast Sunday evening when we arrived so we free-camped along the waterfront and decided to push on towards Fairbanks the next day. It is over a thousand kilometres up the Alaskan highway and we figure that at the pace we travel it will take us about 5 days. Best we get moving!!

Mendenhall Glacier

At Mendenhall Glacier

Top of White Pass - still cold up here!

Glacier Bay

Glacier Bay

Glacier Bay

Lining up for our last ferry trip - this time on the Le Comte