Tok, AK to Dawson City, Yukon Territory, Canada: the Top of the World Highway

It is called the Top of the World Highway because it really feels like it. From the tiny settlement of Chicken the clay road rises continuously to above the timberline and crosses the border into Canada’s Yukon Territory on top of a remote high ridge. The road follows the ridges all the way to Dawson City. The road after the border is mostly “chip sealed” and / or simply gravel. The scenery stretches for ever but the pictures do not capture the vastness or the emptiness of the area.

We left Tok after some housekeeping delays and headed toward Chicken, AK. A short few miles before Chicken, a sign says: “Pavement ends” … and it does. From then on until we shut down in Dawson City (not to be confused with Dawson Creek, BC) we ate dust while we learned to ride on powdery clay then on gravel-on-clay. We left at least a couple hundred yards distance between us so we would not be constantly in the dust wake of the leading rider. However, pickup trucks and especially semi-trucks coming the other way raised huge billowing dust clouds that took away ALL visibility for long seconds while, white eyed, we hoped not to run into a berm of gravel, an animal or another vehicle.

Chicken, year around population 15, 4 outhouses, 1 saloon - got its name because the miners who registered it could not agree on the correct spelling of Ptarmigan. These grouses were plentiful in the area and provided meat for the pot – the miners referred to them as “chickens”. There we met a friendly North Carolinian, Aaron, and had lunch together. He finished his master’s degree in the spring and has been riding his refurbished 1200 Goldwing; up and down the East Coast then west to Alaska. Fully loaded he says he is “at a thousand pounds”. He does his own repairs, and saves money by camping. He had just gone over the Top of the World Highway that morning and from the dust on him and his motorcycle we got an inkling of what was in store for us.

Arriving in Dawson City is really cool: there is no bridge over the Yukon so a free ferry runs back and forth. The river carries a lot of water and is amazingly swift so the ferry ride follows a parabolic course from one side to the other. We remained seated on our bikes holding the brakes because there is no ramp on the landing and the ferry simply rams the shoreline, and drops its ramp. Dawson City is at the confluence of the Yukon and the Klondike rivers. These names fired the adventure dreams in the children’s novels I read growing up; being here is exciting for me. Dawson City retains its gold mine character (saloons/gambling and dance halls) and many of its original buildings. Our hotel “Yukon Hotel” was built in 1898. We have the run of it and our very large room overlooks the river.

Dawson City is also where the exhausted, starving would-be miners arrived floating down the ice clogged Yukon from Whitehorse, YT and were met by the fresh, well fed would-be miners who had not rushed headlong into the wilderness but had waited for the steamer service to begin and cruised up in style to the Klondike gold fields! The former had clawed their way up the mountain and glaciers out of Skagway, AK to the border where the Mounties would require them to show enough supplies to last them one year before entering Canada and head for the Klondike gold fields. So these adventurers went back and forth from the border to Skagway in miserable weather moving all their supplies up ridiculously steep, snow covered terrain on their backs. Once through the border, they wintered in very rough (very cold) country waiting for the ice to begin melting. When this started they built log rafts and floated the river toward Dawson City. How any survived is a mystery to me.