Winding Down

Now that we have reached the last week of August, we are starting to feel our Alaskan adventure winding down. We are back in Fairbanks, one of the places where it all started. We were her two months ago, at the beginning of the Summer, and so much has happened since then. We have been to the southern coast, we have seen salmon running and eagles and bears fishing, glaciers calving and whales fluting. We have enjoyed kayaking on Kodiak Island with puffins and fishing for halibut in Cook Inlet. We have been wowed by high mountains and bear cubs.

Things are not completely over yet in Alaska. We will go from Fairbanks to Tok and then take the Top-Of-The-World Highway out of Alaska to Dawson City, Yukon, one of the icon towns of the Gold Rush. Then really begins the long, long drive back through Canada to the lower 48. Our current plan at that point is to visit Ellyn’s siblings and Father on the West Coast, mainly because we may not be out this way for a long time. After two long trips these past two years, we will be restricting our travels mostly to the East Coast for the next year and a half at least. To get to our Winter home in Sarasota, Florida, we will have to drive nearly as far as we have already traveled in our journey since we left Boston in May, about 7,000 miles.

In Fairbanks, we did a few errands, got some supplies, and rested up for the long journey that remains. We got Jordy groomed, picked up some Alaskan beers for our “beer-snob” sons (their term), and replaced our 20 pound propane tank, which Geoff somehow left at our campground in Palmer. Geoff got to see a little auto racing at the “Northern Most Paved Race Track in North America”. Our friends, Ken and Martha returned from their adventure to the Arctic Ocean and we got to share our experience of seeing Mount Denali in all its glory. We drove around to the Creamer’s Field Waterfowl Refuge and saw Canada Geese and Sandhill Cranes gathering for their migration south. We will be joining them.

Chicken and Eagle

On our way out of Alaska, we visited some of the most remote parts you can get to by road…Chicken and Eagle. Chicken is a tiny gold mining town on the Taylor Highway, also known as the “Top of the World” Highway. This route eventually leads to Dawson City, Yukon, and is mostly graveled. Chicken is very small and quaint, consisting mainly of a gas station, a couple of eating establishments, an RV park, and a tourist attraction in the form of a gold dredge. The dredge was hauled here from a more remote area. The town was supposed to be called “Ptarmigan”, named for the small, Alaskan bird, but the residents could not spell it. The café near the dredge has a wonderful bakery, where they make very good pies, cookies, and pastries. We had dinner there our first night and followed it up with pie ala mode. Yum!

The second day in Chicken, we piled into Ken and Martha’s car and drove to Eagle, an even more remote town in Alaska, on the Yukon River, right on the border of Yukon Territory, Canada. Eagle was once a thriving town, key in river traffic from Dawson City along the Yukon River, and an Army Outpost. Now it is struggling. Tourist traffic does not come here much any more because of problems with the road going there not being able to handle heavy tour buses. We took in the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve Visitor’s Center, and a walking tour through the town and the old Army Fort buildings.

The drive in and out was a grueling, 3 hour each way, ordeal. A lot of twists and turns and switch-backs. Although the terrain was interesting and possibly quite photogenic, the combination of poor weather (cloudy and spritzing rain off and on) and the devastation of fire several years ago, made most pictures drab, at best. Just the same, we were taken by the splash of Autumn colors over the hills. The ever-present fireweed, that we had seen in various stages of bloom over the entire state, were devoid of their flowers here, with their leaves turning bright red, and seed pod fuzz starting to show.

Next, we drive the rigs over most of this same terrain and gravel highway, out of Alaska, into Yukon, and on to Dawson City.