July 20 - Top of the World Highway

After a rainy day on Tuesday, we got lucky with a beautiful sunny day for our trip across the Top of the World Highway.   The first stop was the ferry, which is the only way to cross the Yukon River to head west from Dawson City.  We wondered how this would go with our truck and trailer being about 53 feet long, but there was room for us plus a few cars and motorcycles.

 

Once we got to the other side, it was a long uphill climb.  We spotted one fox along the way (blurry pic though), but other than that no critters.  The views were great though, and the road all the way to the US border was pretty good and mostly paved.  Goodbye Dawson City!

We spotted a few old cabins like this along the way.

The Top of the World Highway pretty much follows along the tops of the mountains, especially on the Canada side.

There was a pull-out at the very top.  A short hike to the top of a hill and we really felt like we were on the Top of the World.

Just past US Customs, we came to the first town in Alaska - appropriately named Boundary.  Looked like a pretty lonely place, but they probably like it that way.

Right away the road got real bumpy.  Full of potholes pretty much for the whole 42 miles to Chicken.  We found ourselves slowing down to 2 or 3 mph quite a bit so we didn't break something. 

The views were great though.  Here's a view of Wade Creek from pretty high up.  Luckily there wasn't much traffic, because there were some pretty steep drop-offs right at the road edge that we for sure didn't want to get close to. 

We finally met some workers grading the road.  Were we glad to see them!  Unfortunately, there weren't enough of them and the road got real bumpy again.

At one point along the way, we stopped to help a couple that had a locked up front brake.  After about an hour, their caliper was off and wired up out of the way.  He had about 100 miles of rough, mountain road driving to get to Dawson City, but off they went anyway with one front brake. Hope they made it!

We rolled into Chicken, Alaska and stopped for a bit of fuel, dinner (what else - chicken sandwiches!) and a stroll through the gift shop.  There were campgrounds there too, but we decided to keep going for a while.

Just outside of Chicken, we finally got some paved road, well mostly paved.

We ended up stopping at the Walker Fork Campground, between Chicken and Tok.  It is run by the BLM (Bureau of Land Management).  No hookups, but a nice camp with trees and lots of space between campsites.  A nice change from the private, parking lot style private campgrounds.  They even had a "moose pond", but we never did see the moose.  A nice little campfire and we were ready to turn in after a tough 150 mile day.