June 14, Tok to Dawson City---180 miles

We left the Happy Bus at the Sourdough RV Park and drove the Jeep over the Taylor Highway (all roads here are named) to Dawson City today with a stop in Chicken. The road had stretches of pavement but was mostly gravel washboards laced together with potholes and frost boils. We stopped in Chicken on the way and had a great home-cooked gourmet lunch (no, it wasn’t chicken). One story explaining the community’s name says it was coined at a town meeting in the late 1800’s. Ptarmigan was suggested for the town because there were many of these chicken-like birds in the vicinity. Since no one could spell ptarmigan, someone suggested calling the town Chicken. We had to take a ferry across the Yukon River to get into Dawson City and it was like the Twilight Zone and we went back 100 years when we got into town. The buildings are all old, but neat, the streets are dirt and the sidewalks are all boardwalks. It reminded me of Saratoga, Wyoming when I was a kid. We stayed at the Downtown Hotel, stopped at a couple of pubs and went to Diamond Tooth Gerties for the floor show. We really had a great time and enjoyed the town a lot. I could live there……in the summer, and get along just fine.