Day 76, Sat, Aug 18, 2007, Chicken, AK to Dawson City, Yukon Territory, Canada

Well we finally made it to Canada. We left Chicken, AK at noon today and traveled the 40 miles or so on the Top of the World Highway to the Canadian border over some of the worst roads I’ve ever traveled. It took us about three hours to travel that stretch. The entire trip was on gravel road with potholes, washboards, several narrow places and some loose gravel where they had made repairs. The dust was terrible, but fortunately it was not rainy or it would have been slick.

I have not had any white knuckle driving since we left home, but that 40 miles was all white knuckle driving. We even saw one place where a motorhome or travel trailer had gotten too close to the edge and gone down a ravine. There was nothing there but shreds of stuff. It had happend two or three days before, so I'm sure most of it had been hauled away by now. We heard someone mention it in Tok and supposedly the occupants only suffered minor cuts and bruises. We could not figure out how they could have come out of it alive.

Once we hit the Canadian border the road was much better, but it was still pretty rough and also had loose gravel in places, but for the most part it was hard gravel (almost like pavement) and even had lines marked. We did run into some light rain for much of the trip from the Canadian border into Dawson City. Even still we only averaged about 35 miles per hour from there to Dawson City.

When we came down the long steep hill and entered Dawson City, we had to come to an abrupt stop at the river’s edge. We thought we had taken a wrong turn, but no, you have to take the free ferry across the Yukon River to actually get into town. That was neat.

We then secured a campsite about a mile out of town and then went back to town for an outstanding fish and chip dinner (cod). It was some of the best cod we’ve had. Then we went back to the campground and used their RV wash to get the ton of dust and dirt off the RV.

We drove 120 miles total today. The low temp in Chicken was 43 degrees, and the warmest we saw was 77 here in Dawson City.

Pictures: Click here