chicken, alaska - five years ago

[nibot]

Chicken, Alaska is an outpost with an official population of just seventeen persons. It's located on the "Alcan" highway that connects the Alaskan Interior to Canada, and thereby the rest of the North American highway system. I camped there five years ago this weekend. The municipality is named, if I recall correctly, for an arctic ptarmigan. We were on our way to Inuvik, Northwest Territory. Right now Chicken is threatened by the tremendous wildfires that have engulfed the state of Alaska.

Monday, July 05, 2004 - CHICKEN--Susan Wiren stood on the porch of her gift store in this Taylor Highway town Sunday staring at an empty dirt parking lot and a haze of smoke that completely blocked the view of a distant ridge she normally enjoys. The scene has gotten a little old this summer for Wiren, owner of the four businesses that make up downtown Chicken. Smoke from fires that ignited in mid-June has scared off the stream of visitors who normally flock to Wiren's shops to snatch up quirky Chicken-related memorabilia. "Look at it. It looks like we're living in another world," Wiren said. "We feel like we're on another planet." ... Chicken, a community of only a handful of year-round residents about 70 miles north of Tok, is being flanked by the 120,000-acre Chicken Fire and the 30,000-acre Wall Street Fire. So far, the wildland fires burning along the Taylor Highway and near Eagle have consumed nearly 1 million acres. Currently, more the 350 firefighters are working in the area, including six elite crews from the Lower 48. (continues in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner)

The redhead on the right there is Steve Hudson. After that summer in Alaska, Steve became a graduate student at the University of Washington. His first year in graduate school he wintered over at the South Pole. Steve's web page includes lots of great pictures, including some from our time in Chicken.

My main memory of Chicken is of the bar there, with all the baseball caps and other requisite kitsch stapled to the walls in the hazy interior. There was a jukebox, and I think it played Don McLean's American Pie. We played pool. But most of all we were regailed with tales by Linda, the bearded lady barkeep who had experienced in her years the adventures most people secretly envy -- riding the rails, jumping freights from sea to shining sea, seeing the country as a sort of hobo. Spending arctic nights soaking in boreal hot springs while the aurora exploded overhead. Said she was heading down to Fairbanks at the end of the summer to take part in a UAF dinosaur dig on the North Slope. Sure enough, come August we found her in a photo of the University paleontology team, out on a dig in the far north.

In Chicken we encamped by the river, and in the morning we continued to Dawson City, Yukon.

[i have no idea why this entry doesn't have a "comment" option.. er, let's try this: comment or read comments.]

Comments

[kaolinfire.livejournal.com]

I was thinking the weirdness of the no-comment-ness was my changing my style over and the new style being somewhat less robust. Actually, it gives a comment/readcomments down at the bottom in a slightly messed-up manner, as opposed to over at the right as it does for all the other posts.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

it seems to be a strange result of forgetting a </tr> tag.

[ragnus.livejournal.com]

the comment tags show up the top of my friends' page (even when there are other entries on top of it).

[heike.livejournal.com]

I must have passed through Chicken, since I've driven the whole length of the Alcan, but I don't remember it.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

well.. the article says it's on the taylor highway, so i'd have to find an alaska highways map to figure out what's going on.

[heike.livejournal.com]

Ahh, it's on the way to Dawson, not on the Alcan. So I didn't pass through that way.
On the way up we took the Alcan all the way to Fairbanks and then drove to Anchorage. On the way back we came up the Tok cut-off from the direction of Valdez.

It says something about towns in Alaska that my Rand-McNally road atlas of the US has Chicken marked on it.

[quirkyfemme.livejournal.com]

That sign makes me happy.