Sharp's Travels

It was almost 7am when we woke up this morning. We ate a quick bowl of cereal for breakfast. Members of our caravan slowly started to line up behind us. At 9am the border opened and we made our way across. The roads were still dirt covered and lots of pot holes. We drove slowly and took in all the beautiful scenery.

We arrived in Chicken at 11am. Chicken has a population of 21 in the summer, 6 in the winter. Chicken is getting more and more traffic each year as the Klondike Loop grows in popularity with motorist. The Chicken Creek Saloon and Café are some of the last remnants of the old frontier Alaska. The café is famous throughout Alaska for its good, real home made food, including homemade pies, cookies & cinnamon rolls.

We had lunch at Susan’s café. Spike had called ahead and had her fix chicken noodle soup and sandwiches for the caravan.

We checked out the old dredge on our way back from lunch. It operated on Chicken Creek between 1959 and 1967. They were land-locked floating machines, digging ponds that allowed them to float across the area to be mined.

We used our free time before to update our blog and load all the pictures until 4pm when we were given a personal tour of the old town of Chicken. There are a number of old buildings still standing and they have a bunch of old diaries to help them with the history back then. It has been declared an historic site and they are slowly restoring the buildings and will eventually give more tours there.

On our way to old Chicken we saw a moose and her 2 little ones. This is the first moose we’ve seen up here in Alaska.

At 6 pm a group of about 25 of us from the caravan went back over to Susan’s Café for BBQ Chicken dinner. It was excellent.

We walked back to the 5th wheel and uploaded the blog and pictures and turned in for the night.

Gay has uploaded pictures of the day. See two albums: Yukon/Alaska border to Chicken 7-12-08 and Chicken 7-12-08