Alaska/Canada 2017-14: Alaskan Kindness, Boondocking, Ptarmigans, & Changing Plans: Chitina, Copper River, Little Tok River, Tok, & Chicken

    Marilyn had booked a flight home from Valdez, as she'd decided to take Doug's suggestion from their trip-planning days. She'd give her fused spine a break, and Doug would make the 2,700-mile drive home solo. Fortunately, she'd learned from a woman while doing laundry in Homer that she could also fly out of Haines, which gave her another week in Alaska! 
    The plan was to drive the 700 miles from Valdez to Haines and spend a couple of days in Haines. Recalling that with Doug plans are merely ideas, this of course was subject to change.

Purple: our planned route from Valdez to Haines. Red: our actual route from Valdez to Haines.

    So we left Valdez driving north on Hwy 4 to the intersection with Hwy 1 at Glennallen. But when we got to the McCarthy Rd turnoff, we decided to drive at least the 33 miles of paved road to Chitina, on the Copper River. 

    In Chitina, we drove through the narrow cut in the rock that marks the beginning of the McCarthy Rd, took a look at the road, and decided we weren't sure how the van—or we ourselves—would do on 60 miles of dirt road, condition unknown but potentially not great.

There were several Alaska Native fish wheels in the wide, silted Copper River. The photo is of one in the Chilkat River near Haines.

 
    Thanks to a tip in The Milepost, the bible to Alaska, we camped on the edge of the river in a wide pullout on O'Brien Creek Road. We had it all to ourselves, with perfect weather and a grand view.

Campsite on Copper River near Chitina.

    And we had another Alaska experience. A young couple who stopped and chatted had driven down from Fairbanks just for the day—over 300 miles and 5 hours each way. They’d had success fishing and offered us an entire salmon! We declined, as sadly we didn’t have the means to clean and filet it.

Lots of laughter drifted across the water from the folks in the small boats.

5:45 AM. on the Copper River.

    The next morning, returning back to Hwy 4, we were treated to a heard of Tibetan yaks. You never know what amazing sight you’ll see in Alaska!

Tibetan Yaks along Edgerton Hwy, which runs the 33 miles from the Richardson Hwy to Chitina.

    At Glennallen, as planned, we turned east on Hwy 1, the Tok Cut-off.

Tok Cutoff portion of Alaska 1.

    With his usual pilot's pan that picks up everything while he's driving, Doug noticed what looked like a camping spot along a river.

Looking from bridge to Little Tok River.

We turned around, drove back across the bridge and down to the Little Tok River, and set up camp.

Boondocking—some call it stealth camping—on Little Tok River. 

Once again we camped in a beautiful, peaceful free spot. Except for a couple of fishermen who stopped to throw in a line for a few minutes, we had all to ourselves.

We slept to the sound of the Little Tok River rippling along beside us.

Boondocking on the Little Tok River.

    We broke camp in the morning and headed to nearby Tok for breakfast—often our one meal out of the day. While looking at maps over breakfast, an idea struck: We really should make a side trip to Chicken. It would add a mere 140 miles and 3 to 4 hours to our trip, as well as give us bragging rights to another Alaska Highway: 5, the Taylor Highway, though Marilyn was the only one excited by this fact.
    So of course, off we went to Chicken after breakfast. Not long after starting up Highway 5, we saw caribou in the road ahead.

Caribou in the road on the way from Tok to Chicken, AK In the distance the highway turns to dirt.

The caribou obligingly moved off the road to let us pass. 

    Not long after, traffic was stopped in both directions to watch a mama moose and her calf. As we'd seen several times, mama foraged in the pond—and got the insects off—while baby stayed on shore.

Mama moose is halfway submerged in the lake while her calf grazes nearby.

Soon the road turned to dirt & gravel.

    You know you're in Chicken when...

Everything's coming up chickens in Chicken, whose founders supposedly could not spell the preferred name, "Ptarmigan." 

7 mph?

As you might imagine for a town whose founders wanted to call it Ptarmigan but didn’t know how to spell it, there wasn’t much there—but not for lack of effort to draw us tourists.

When in Chicken, do as the chickens do--the Chicken Dance, of course!

    A main attraction is the Pedro Dredge.

Pedro Dredge.

The bucket line gold dredge was built by the Yuba Manufacturing Company of California for Fairbanks Exploration Co to mine gold in the gravel along Pedro Creek north of Fairbanks. It was assembled on Pedro Creek in 1938.

In the 1950s, FE Co decided to move the dredge to Chicken Creek. It was disassembled and transported by truck in 1958. 

The dredge had run on electricity on Pedro Creek, but in Chicken it required 2 diesel engines.

3 cubic foot buckets of Pedro Dredge.

From 1958 to 1967, the Pedro Dredge mined the equivalent in today's prices of about $80 million in gold.

In 1998, the dredge was moved a mile, to Chicken.

    All roads from Chicken lead to a Chickenish town somewhere on the globe—at least as the Chicken flies.

4,694 miles to Eggam Faaker, Austria. 2,951 miles to Chicken Gizzard, Kentucky—as the chicken flies.

5,797 miles to Hen, Israel.3007 miles to Chickville, New Hampshire. 4,856 miles to Leghorn, Italy. 7,307 miles to Hen & Chickens, New Zealand. 7,086 miles to Cockadoodle, Australia.

    While getting ready to head back to Tok and on to Haines, we struck up a conversation with a couple who had just pulled into the parking. They were from Longmont, CO, which we know well from visits to family and friends in the area. He'd driven the road between Chicken and Dawson City, much of which is dirt, and said it really wasn't that bad. 

     Doug’s eyes lit up: we’d already been to the Salty Dawg, a Jack London hangout in Homer, and now the possibility of visiting the historic town of Dawson in the Yukon Territory, where London lived during the Klondike Gold Rush, was being dangled in front of him?
    We studied the maps and the calendar. It was only another 100 miles to Dawson. Doug was reluctant to put me on another dirt road, but I only had to say, "On to Dawson!" twice to get him to relent, and we were off up the hill out of Chicken on the dirt road! 

Leaving Chicken, destination Dawson City.

    Did I say Doug was grinning from ear to ear? And he hadn’t yet learned that another of his literary heroes, Robert Service, had also lived in Dawson City.

Up next: the Yukon.