Ok, here goes. I’m 4-6 posts behind. Somehow I don’t think I’m going to catch up today, but maybe two or three?
So, where was I. Oh, yes, a lovely BLM campground called Walker Fork, about 16 miles north of Chicken.
Bumped my way down to Chicken(“bumped” is not quite fair for most of the way, but starting 3-4 miles from Chicken, the road gets pretty rough, and stays that way for a ways south of it.). Anyway, Chicken itself was nicer than I expected. What I saw of it is dominated by a quite nice campground.
It has a really nice gift shop, but so far I havn’t been able to get myself geared up to spending serious money on such things, no matter how nice they are. Partly because the things I’m really attracted to have hefty price tags, and the little things I feel willing to afford are tacky by comparison, with some exceptions, and then there’s the question of who am I buying things for, and it’s all just too much.
Anyway, there are some photo-worthy things there. A chicken . . .
Here for obvious reasons, but as touristy things go, I liked this one.
An old dredge.
A sculpture/figure that reminded me of Kokopelli.
I really liked him.
A moose, not always provided, grazing up on the little hill where the chicken was.
Any time I get a picture of an animal, I consider it a bit of a victory–they really don’t hold still for one very well, so I appreciated her(?) sticking around.
I liked the feel of the place well enough I seriously considered staying there overnight, but I had gotten the notion of driving the Denali Highway, and if I was going to do that, I needed to move on, so after dithering for 20 minutes, and being held up by the construction going on just south of town for another 20 (made easire to bear by conversation with the young woman flagger, who educated me on her job a bit), that’s what I did.
Stopped just a few miles down the road to get some close-ups of what looks like a whole lot of dead spruce. Someone, I think in Dawson City but I don’t remember for sure, had told me that what looked like dead trees really aren’t, they just grow that way because of the permafrost. So I pulled over to get some close-ups.
What do you think? They look pretty dead to me. It’s possible that I’m misremembering what the person said, and that she just meant they aren’t dead from fires but from permafrost, but even that I couldn’t distinguish with any confidence. If anyone wants to educate me about this, have at it. Or maybe I’ll remember to ask the local experts where I’m staying now in Fairbanks (more on that in a few posts down the road.)
Stopped for lunch at a roadside rest stop.
With the bonus of my first sighting of snow-covered peaks in Alaska (far background.) Here are some closer pics of the same mountains.
Not to neglect the green beauty closer to hand.
Made it to Tok, where I took some time to gets some supplies, and then continued toward Delta Junction. I was getting tired by that point; my memory of the road from Chicken to where that road meets the Alaska Highway is that much of it it was the roughest I had encountered up to there, although the last 10-15 miles of it were OK. Anyway, I didn’t make my goal of a campground just short of Delta Junction, pulling over into a rest area that clearly used to be an actual campground and was being used as such by several people. So that’s where I spent the night–it had everything I need, a lavel place to park near a quite nice vault toilet. This was about 30 miles east of Delta Junction, next to a bridge.
I have to say, if anyone had asked me likely places to have a Black Veterans Memorial Bridge, Alaska would not have made my list. But good for Alaska.
I’m still not quite sure what the river is, maybe the Tanana? But in addition to the other amenities proveded at that stop, there was walking CJ (off leash) over to the river and taking pictures of the mountains that were visible from there.
It was a short drive in to Delta Junction in the morning, which also happens to be the official end of the Alaska Highway.
There, having cell service for the first time in a few days, I spend some time doing digital stuff, including a blog post that took quite awhile, and not fully exploring the rather nice visitor’s center. I was wanting to get moving toward the Denali highway, which after topping up on diesel, I did.
More soon.
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