july 12

July 12
We decided to go to the town of Chicken AK. We left Tok late about 11:30 and headed up the Taylor Hwy. Road is paved & pretty good most of the way. You just have to go slow. The dirt road was not too bad. Just slow going. There is nothing really in Chicken except a store, campground and gold panning. We had a coupon for a free chicken and thought we had dinner covered until they handed us a little chicken on a key chain. We decided not to camp there and go down or up the road.
This is a fairly narrow dirt road with a beautiful view. Alaska’s pine bark beetles are really bad and they are having a tough time controlling them. There is a wildflower they call fireweed. It is not red. They call it that because after a wild fire that is the first thing to grow. It took me a while to figure that one out.
Forty mile river caribou range was the migration range for huge herds of caribou. There use to be 550,000 caribou migrating each spring/fall and there are only about 23,000 left. They are trying to control the hunting to bring the population back, because that was there breeding grounds.
The drive is breathtaking. They call it the top of the world highway and you feel like you are there.
It was slow going so we stopped at Walker Fork BLM campground for the night.