Dawson City, YT to West Fork BLM Campground, Mile 49 of Taylor Highway, AK
Another clear, cloudless morning with the temperature at its usual 50 degrees. You’d think perhaps the thermometer was broken, but no, we have two of them – one at the back and one at the front of the motorhome and they’re consistently within a degree of each other. The clear skies are a good thing because today we tackled the “Top of the World Highway,” a 79-mile stretch of mainly gravel and packed dirt that is notoriously famous for being slippery and some say downright treacherous when it’s wet. So a string of three or four days without rain as we’ve had now is a good thing.
As we were drinking our morning coffee, Jeanette mentioned the strangest phenomenon. She had awoken at 1:00 am and looked out to see the red glow of the sunset outside the window of the motorhome, which was facing basically north. She awoke again at 4:00 am to see the red glow of sunrise at almost the same location, which seemed very puzzling. We thought about that all day, and it wasn’t until tonight that I realized what was happening. At home, we’re used to seeing the sun rise just a few degrees north of due east and set just a few degrees north of due west. However, at this far northern latitude (64 degrees at Dawson), the sun’s track is radically different. It rises really far north of due east, creeping above the horizon way to the northeast – almost to the north-northeast. It then sweeps across the southern sky at a low angle until it sets correspondingly far to the northwest. I actually watched the sun tonight as it traversed the western sky almost horizontally until it went behind a hill. Of course in winter it rises and sets at similar angle far to the southeast and southwest, making the days very short.
But back to the events of the day…We left the campground a few minutes after nine and drove down to the ferry landing. The TOW starts with a brief ferry ride across the Yukon River at the north end of Dawson. The river is quite wide at this point – I’d guess about a quarter mile – and running swift. We had a short wait of perhaps ten minutes for the ferry to return to our side and disgorge its load of only a couple of cars before boarding and setting of on our day’s adventure. The ferry itself is a miniature version of the Port Aransas ferry, for the sake of reference for family and friends from Texas, and holds probably eight normal size passenger cars – fewer, of course if part of the load is a truck, tour bus, or an RV or two. Because of the strong current, the ferry swings fairly far downstream, then churns its way back upriver to the landing on the far shore. It takes about five minutes to get from one side of the river to the other.
The road immediately began a steep climb up the hill on the west side of the river. At one point there is a pull-out with a spectacular view of Dawson City far below. The road then turns right and begins its journey over the Top of the World. The first half dozen miles or so are paved, but it soon transitions to a well-graded gravel road. Because the tree line is so low here, about 3000 feet, we were soon above the trees and into the Krumholz zone, the transition between timber and tundra that we see in Colorado at about 11,000 to 11,500 feet. Once on the top of the hill, the highway stays at an elevation of 3000 to 3600 feet, which keeps it in this zone of stunted spruce trees and low willow-like trees for most of the 60 miles to the Alaska border. The road follows the long spine of a mountain ridge, dipping here and there and crossing numerous low saddles from one side of the ridge to the other. The view is spectacular – a range of rugged mountains far to the north and miles and miles of ridgelines to the south as far as you can see, and always steep drops into narrow, vee-shaped valleys on the sides of the ridge. The road is fairly wide, and generally well-maintained. There are short sections of pavement – what is commonly known as chip and seal – here and there, but never for more than a few hundred yards at a time. My general impression of this portion of the road is that it’s similar to some of the better unimproved county roads in Colorado, only better in the sense that there is almost zero washboarding.
The last few miles before the Alaska border the road once again reverts to pavement, and it climbs to its highest elevation, approximately 4200 feet. Here it is truly above timberline and in the tundra.
The border crossing sits high on a windswept slope. It looks like a miserable place to live and work (and the customs officers, both American and Canadian are certain to live in the couple of residential structures adjacent to the border because it’s 60 miles to the nearest town in one direction and 120 miles in the other). It makes one wonder who the customs officers pissed off to cause them to be assigned here. But perhaps some like this duty and this lifestyle – it is layed back, waaay layed back.
On the Alaskan side of the border the road immediately digresses to a narrow, packed dirt road. It is similar to some of the “better” off-pavement Forest Service roads in Colorado, complete with ruts, dips, potholes, and bumps. Imagining this road in the rain, I can see why it gets its reputation. And yes, they do bring tour buses up this road.
Just four miles from the border is the “settlement” of Boundary, Alaska, a collection of three or four decrepit buildings on the side of the road that once served (and may soon again serve) as a roadhouse, complete with a gas pump and café. A new owner has taken over, and as we pulled in he and his son were in the process of installing a satellite antenna on the roof so he could offer wi-fi to passing tourists. Imagine that – an internet café in the heart of the Alaskan wilderness. It may not be such a far-fetched idea, though. If he can get the place up and running and get the tour buses to stop there, he could make a passable living. That’s what keeps the Braeburn Lodge on the Whitehorse to Dawson City highway, where we stopped for our giant cinnamon bun a couple of days ago, afloat and it could be the same for this guy. Heck, if he just got a couple of decent restrooms going, the buses would stop here rather than the rest stop a couple of miles up the road where there’s only a couple of outhouses. When we passed that simple gravel pull-out, there were two tour buses stopped and lines of tourist waiting to use the “facilities.”
Nineteen miles from the Alaska border, the Top of the World Highway intersects the Taylor Highway, marking the end of the TOW. Calling these two dirt roads highways is a bit of a stretch, but if one could take a time machine back to the early 20th century in the lower 48 states, I guess this was the norm for our country’s road system. A few years ago I read a book about the first people to cross the US from coast to coast in an automobile, and roads like these would probably have seemed like a luxury to them.
The road conditions began to improve slightly as we continued the 25 miles or so into the little village of Chicken, Alaska. Chicken began its life as a mining town back in the late 1800’s. The story goes that the original settlers wanted to call the town Ptarmigan because those wild, chicken-like birds were common in the area. The only problem was, no one in the town knew how to spell Ptamigan, so they just called it Chicken.
Only one significant building from its glory years remains – a combination trinket shop, bar, liquor store, and café known as “Downtown Chicken, Alaska.” We stopped and bought some barbequed chicken to go for tonight’s dinner, and while we waited for the chicken in Chicken I used their free wi-fi to upload yesterday’s blog post. Who knows when I’ll have the chance to upload this one; maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day.
South of Chicken, we finally hit pavement. The road follows a creek down toward Tetlin Junction, a few miles east of Tok, where it intersects the Alaska Highway. There are several small-scale mining operations in the creek, mainly using small bulldozers and sluices. There must be at least a small profit in this mom-and-pop gold mining, because they seem to have been here for a while.
As we were preparing to leave the campground in Dawson this morning, I was talking to the people camped next us, a couple from Whitehorse in a small, 13-ft “Escape” travel trailer (similar to a Casita of Scamp, but made in Canada). They told us of a campground south of Chicken that they had stayed at a few years ago and remembered as being near a river. So as we were driving today we checked our Church’s Campground Guide and saw the BLM West Fork Campground at Mile 49 of the Taylor Highway. That was the only campground along this stretch of road, so it had to be it. It was easy to spot with its large BLM sign, so we pulled in and found a nice back-in campsite in the trees – no services of course, but only $5.00 with our Federal geezer pass. It’s good to be back in the USA and to be able to take advantage of these terrific bennies that our leaders in Washington so graciously provide.
We hadn’t been here a half hour before our new-found friends from Whitehorse rolled in and set up camp just a couple of hundred feet away. So after dinner we took our folding chairs and strolled down to share a campfire with them and another neighbor, a motorcyclist from Maryland who’s making a three-month bucket list tour of Alaska and western Canada. We meet such interesting people along the way – just one of the many reasons we enjoy this style of travel.
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