Chicken, on to Dawson City

Thursday-Friday, August 12-13.  We settled in for our day in Chicken.  We kept checking with the businesses to see if the Friday Convoy was still on, and so far so good.  Us women decided to try our hand at gold panning again, since the creek was right beside us, and it was, historically, one of the most prosperous creeks in the area.

No luck again, so we gave up on that.  We did get to see them haul a piece of heavy equipment through the creek, a track-hoe Joe says.

We did another drive around to the other gift shops, then came back to get ready  for our second round of panning.

Here I am, Prospector Wilma.  My back about killed me after this round, so I don't think I will take on prospecting as my second career.  (I forgot my hat this time).

Now, Joe has assumed the role of "gold panning pimp" and we are his women, I guess.  He usually drives us to the creek (this time, he didn't have to), sometimes he shovels a little for us, and just keeps an eye on us.

See him up on the bank in the chair.  Here's a better shot of him in his supervisory role.

We stuck with it for quite a while this time, firmly believing we would surely find something.  We think we might have had some gold dust in our pans, but didn't know how to capture those grains (which were probably sand, anyway).  Although we were armed with a little plastic suction bottle, a pair of tweezers, and our vials for our find, we came back empty-handed.  We had a free consultant parked next to us, Thunder Jack, who told us the secret of panning, but it didn't help any.  Mostly, he was an expert at B.S.

We walked around our campground and came upon this pint-sized bulldozer that we thought Cody would like to have for his bike track.

We all had an early night so we could be up bright and early, and in line, the next morning.  Here's the convoy, ready to pull out. 

This is the line-up in the campground (above).  Here's the one on the road.

We counted 46 units in our convoy.  David had to pull out of line to let a semi out, hauling equipment, so we graciously allowed him to cut back in when we started moving.  We got started at 7:55 a.m.

And up the road we went!

We had to eat David's dust for the next 2 1/2 hours.  We got to the Eagle turnoff (where the convoy ended) at 10:30, approximately 30 miles.  We did see a lot of road damage and evidence of flooding as we drove along, and we saw where they had put in a couple new culverts the day before.  There were 28 units in the convoy waiting to head to Chicken, and they didn't give us much room to pass.

On this part of the trip, we had mostly been down near the creeks and rivers.  Once we got past the Jack Wade Junction, we started to climb and really saw some pretty mountain scenery for the rest of the drive.  This highway is called "Top of the World," and it lived up to its name.  It was beautiful.

We came up on the Border Crossing about 10:30 and got right through.  They questioned Marilyn a little more thoroughly because she was driving the dinghy separately, but we all made it through.  Here we are coming up on Customs.  You are not allowed to take any pictures right at Customs.

We didn't stop at any of the viewpoint pull-outs on the way to the Border Crossing because we didn't want the rest of the convoy to get in front of us.  But there was a pull-off just a mile past, so we got some good pictures of the "Top of the World" highway from here.

There were some berries here that we think are "low bush cranberries."  Wasn't much of a bush to them. 

It was mostly a gravel road the entire day, with a few patches of chip-seal.  All of our rigs got filthy, inside any openings and certainly on the outside.

We thought we had been seeing beautiful scenery all along, then we picked up a new mountain range far off to the north.  It didn't have any snow that we could see, but the mountains were very high.  We don't have a map with us that shows what this mountain range is, so we'll have to look that up when we get home (unless someone lets us know).

Finallhy, we got to the Yukon River.  We had to cross the ferry here to get over to Dawson City, where we camped. 

The Klondike River converges here with the Yukon.  Here's the ferry that took us across.

The town of Dawson City is celebrating Dawson Days this weekend, so we'll see what kind of trouble we can find.  It has tried to maintain its gold rush flavor, so we'll check out the town and get some pictures tomorrow.   Here's the view of the town as we came down the hill to the ferry.