From Eagle to Dawson City

8/6 We leave Eagle at 10 AM Alaska time and the road is good and fast dirt. We are at the intersection to head to Dawson City in a short time. The road is partially paved with New York size potholes and some rough gravel after we cross into Canada. It took us just 4 hours to get to Dawson City. The posted travel time is 6 ½ hours. William drives fast when he has good roads.  When we get to the Yukon there is no bridge, just a small ferry. 

Here comes the ferry

Bill is watching

The ferry is almost to land

The cars unload

Our turn to get on

We are on the river

And quickly we are ready to land

 We are in the front of the line and while we wait we see a paddlewheeler going down the river. We decide that we will have a river cruise. Later we find out that cruise ships have bought up the day use of the boat and allow no one but their cruisers on during the day. We sign up for an evening cruise that may or may not be a go. They have to have at least 15 passengers.

We had our short cruise across the river on the ferry.

We search out the downtown RV park and sign up for 3 nights.

William, the old miner

Downtown to Sourdough Joe's for a late lunch that is later than we thought. Instead of putting our watches ahead when we pass into Pacific time, we set them back. So it was really almost 4 PM when we ate lunch. No wonder we were hungry.

Time to rest and clean up. Time to look at my desktop elves.

8/7

Walking around Dawson City we see a lot of interesting leaning buildings.

Bill is in front of "Guns and Ammo"

 Continuing to tour around Dawson City today, we went to presentations at the Robert Service Cabin and the Jack London Cabin.

The Robert Service Cabin with the docent in front. Pretty nice 2 room cabin.

The Jack London Cabin was much rougher.  The cabin was divided between here and Oakland. Oakland got the lower logs and Dawson got the upper logs.

London's was a real miner's cabin inside.

This evening we went for a dinner cruise on the Klondike Spirit.

boat graveyard. With roads and planes these boats were not wanted.

A Yukon cave dweller

Boat shadow on the big Yukon River

Bill and the Klondike Spirit

Klondike Spirit

From North Pole to Eagle

8/2 We finally leave Fairbanks and head to North Pole. Santa Claus House is the place to go. We sit on Santa's lap and have fun shopping for Christmas presents.

At the turnoff after Tok we head on the road to Chicken. We have driven quite a ways for us and turn off to stop at the West Fork Campground.

The site William picks has a bench overlooking a lake. I listen hard and hear some bird sounds, gray jays and ravens. I also hear a few frog croaks. This is amazing. There is only one frog in Alaska and no other reptiles or amphibians. Only the wood frog. It survives by freezing solid in the winter and thawing out in the spring.

Johna's Lake. Croak croak

8/3 The campground hosts Mitch and Jan are very friendly. When we express an interest in blueberry picking they take us to a patch down the road from the campground. We picked a full quart of berries. Enough for two small berry cobblers.

“Beautiful Downtown Chicken” is our next stop. We stop for lunch at the Chicken Cafe and meet some bikers from North Carolina who are also truckers. They plan to fill out applications to be ice road truckers, just for fun.

Beautiful Downtown Chicken

There are three competing Chickens. Gold Camp is where the Holland America bus comes. You can tour the dredge, pan for gold, pet the puppies, ride the wheeled sled and shop at the gift shop.

chicken statue at Gold Camp

Giant gold dredge at Gold Camp

 We shopped at the gift shop in “Beautiful Downtown Chicken.” Each “Chicken” has an RV park, but we choose to stay outside of town at the Walker Fork Campground, another BLM campground. You can't beat the $5 price for seniors.

The fireweed is almost at the top. When it is at the top summer is over.

Before we get to the turnoff to the campground we come upon the scene of an RV accident. A big rig pulling a tag vehicle hit the soft shoulder and slid down the bank landing over on the passenger side. This happened the day before so the people had been rescued uninjured. Now the problem was how to drag this big bus RV up to the road. It is a pretty long way down. We eventually heard that they needed two tow trucks, a tractor and a motor grader as dead men, to pull it up.

8/4 The dirt road has been smooth sailing. Much better than the gravel roads we hit in the Yukon, so William decides we should go all the way to Eagle. The road goes on forever into the trackless wilderness. At mile 109 an elk runs down the road in front of us at speeds up to 32 mph.

At the bridge over the historic mining river of Fortymile there is a rest stop that answers the age old question.

Do bears shit in the woods? Not if the government builds them an outhouse.

At mile 160 we arrive in Eagle. We had planned to lunch in the Riverside Cafe. The best, only, restaurant in town according to the Lonely Planet we had. But the Cafe washed away in the flood when the ice on the Yukon broke up in the first week of May 2009.

The sign on the building is the high water mark quite far from the Yukon.  With  high snow and high water the river juat broke up the town at break up.

We watched a video on the flood and then went to a pie social at the Improved Order of the Red Men Hall. They only have these once a year and we were just in time.

Sign on the wall in the red men hall

before the flood

Looking back at the town. The Yukon is a big river.

We are camping at a BLM campground outside of town and will go on a docent led walking tour of town Sunday. It will be a long slow trip to Dawson so we will get up early Monday morning to head out.

8/5 On the tour:

Old Episcopal church

Old Arctic Cat, first snowmobile

Upstairs in the NCO quarters at  Fort Egbert

The Eagle airstrip

Much of the tour was of the restored buildings of Fort Egbert. We thought there might have been more walking about the streets of Eagle. But many historic buildings went down in the flood.

Off to Dawson early in the morning.

From Downtown Fairbanks to Barrow

7/30 We spent the day in downtown Fairbanks. The visitor center is huge and lovely with the four seasons displayed dramatically.

A fall brown bear. Don't get between him and his berries.

All around downtown and in the community museum I found interesting sayings.

We'd sooner die by fang or by claw, in the bowels of a frozen hell, than to spend another lonely day where the city slickers dwell.

January 1989. -60 degrees below zero. Visibility 22 feet. 31.8 barometric pressure. 9,377 butts frozen to outhouse seats. Fairbanks, Alaska

A walking park stretches along the Chena River. A farmer's market set up while we were there. We bought some pea sprouts for sandwiches.

A statue about the Lend Lease program after WWII. William said it reminded him of statue park in Budapest.

The antler arch reminded us of the elk antler arch in Jackson Hole Wyoming

7/31 Up early for a shuttle to the airport for our plane trip to Barrow Alaska, to the northernmost tip of the United States. We have done the southernmost tip to Key West, Florida so now we do the northernmost tip.

Our little 8 passenger plane

We stopped off in Coldfoot to stretch our legs and drop off a passenger who lives in Wiseman.

In the Coldfoot Cafe. The post behind us is used to post messages for truckers, since there is no cell service here.

We had a nice guide who drove us all around Barrow pointing out all the sites.

At the northernmost tip of the Barrow Spit

People wishing to escape the hubbub of Barrow sometimes build small dachas out of whatever materials come to hand out here on the spit. Our guide pointed out his grandfather's small place with 3 different colors of plywood. A polar bear had torn the place up 3 times, necessitating the rebuilds.

There are no trees or even shrubs, just tiny bits of grassy green , so people build their own trees.

The welcome to Barrow sign. The older one on the edge of town was used to much for target practice and destroyed. One of the whale skulls had a bomb stuck in the skull.  That is what the explosive shells used to kill them are called.

Another landmark made of whale bones and bones of old whaling boats.

We had a guided tour of the Inupiat Heritage Center, a huge community center, museum and art center.  Along one wall were framed photographs of a successful whale hunt. Finally some color in this shades of gray world. The snow turns bright red with the blood of the whale as the townsfolk butcher it for their traditional food.

Wading in the Arctic Ocean

A small boat's wake added some relief to the flat water.

Time to fly back to Fairbanks.

A last look at Barrow

Since I sit in the front, during the flight I can keep a close watch on the instruments.

The Barrow Wiley Post/Will Rogers Memorial Airport

The fog that had almost socked in Barrow and would have prevented our flight has lifted a bit. The fog is caused by the off shore ice sheet just out of sight. We fly low over the North Slope to give us a look at this flat land.

Flat, flat with puddles and streams of water with green gray land between.

The clouds are still low as we drop down

Through the Gates of the Arctic

On down the Tinaybuk to the North fork of the Koyukuk

We are now Arctic Circle Explorers.