June 18-20, 2009

We went on a tour of the old town of chicken this morning. The story is - early miners named the town Ptarmigan but when they were getting a post office no one knew how to spell it. Consequently, someone suggested “Chicken” for the town name and it stuck. We saw some old buildings and cabins built in the 1890’s and some newer ones built by the dredge company in the 1950’s.

We headed South on the Taylor Highway – the pavement started 2 miles South of Chicken. Even though the road was paved it was still pretty rough with a lot of frost heaves and gravel stretches. We drove through a huge burn area. In the summer of 2004 a fire burned 1.3 million acres and closed the Taylor Highway for several days. . There was a total of 6.5 million acres burned in Alaska that year. They tell us that the blueberries are wonderful here in August.

It was rainy and overcast so we didn’t have good views of the scenery. We reconnected with the Alaskan Highway again just before reaching Tok. We are staying at the Tok RV Village – one of the nicest RV parks we have stayed in so far. They have live entertainment every night with a local guitar and violin players. They were very entertaining. We stayed here for 3 nights and looked around Tok and the area. We enjoyed some down time, walking the dogs and sitting in the sun between rain showers – yes, it has rained every day.