Chicken, AK - Chicken, AK

We woke up to thick fog. Of course. It’s Valdez. But, we’re on our way and, when we crossed the mountains, the sun came out, puffy clouds replaced the overcast and we’re smiling.



Hey, there are some mountains around here. The rumor was true. Much prettier drive through here this time. Our goal is Tok, the first Alaskan town we hit when we arrived in late May and the last Alaskan town we’ll hit in early August. We’ve come full circle and now it’t time to head home. We arrived, hooked up the electricity and - sure enough - rain. Not on the forecast but rain never-the-less. Our 16th day of rain.

Alaska has lots of rivers and most of them seem to be braided and changing channels often. Wide, shallow and fast.

We love finding the airports in the oddest places. As I’ve mentioned, loads of Alaskans have airplanes, sometimes 2 or 3 per family and they fly them everywhere and find the darndest airports. Here’s a grass runway right beside the road.


The next day we took off at 7:55 headed towards Dawson City, passing through the renown Chicken, AK. Nice drive with some great views of - wilderness.

Miles and miles and miles of - wilderness. I’ve heard that the drive to Alaska is ‘Miles and miles of miles and miles.’ I call it a tunnel of trees.

True, true. true.

The road - not so great, lots of potholes, bumps, gravel and patches. But, we expected this. So, Gary drove slowly.

Then we hit Chicken

Chicken: famous for a music festival called ‘Chickenstock’ and as the home and school of Tisha, Anne Hobbes Purdy, Chicken’s most famous inhabitant. One of her schoolchildren pronounced ‘teacher’ as tisha’ and that’s what she titled her book, 'Tisha'. She came to this area in the late 1920’s to teach. She fell in love with the kids and also with a native man, a taboo among the other residents. They tried to discourage her, spoke with her about the problems, some avoided her and removed their kids from her classes. But, in the end, he saved a daughter of one of the other residents and their romance finally was accepted. I really enjoyed the book for its story, its descriptions of life in 1930’s Alaska, the people of her village and, of couse, the love story between two people of very different cultures. She died in 1987 and is buried here in Chicken.

Here is a picture of her school which is still standing but is a tourist attraction now, not a school.

But, Chicken has other interesting things. It has this gold dredge, a huge wooden structure used by large companies to mine for gold.

Dredges could dig below the water level and above the water level. It moved along digging up gold-bearing gravel in front, recovering the gold through a revolving screen system in the middle and depositing the gold-less gravel out the back. It worked every day 24 hours a day for the season which might be as long as 200 days. It was large, loud and efficient.

But this dredge has lots of other tools used in mining arrayed in front of the dredge. Here are lots of the buckets that the dredge used to get scoop the gold up into the dredge,

a huge hose used to dislodge stone from cliffs for it to be scooped up,

Lots of interesting things here about the business of mining for gold.

Then there is the world famous chicken itself with a direction sign, naming other famous chicken places like Lost Chicken, Arkansas; Flocking, Australia; Hen, Israel; Clucker’s Hall, Illinois, etc:

And, another. Need too many chickens.

Our RV looks pretty clean here - check it out in the next blog, only 5 hours later.

There’s gold panning and we saw some flecks of gold that some tourists had found in their pan. Tiny flecks - I needed a magnifying glass.

Here’s the mall.

One restaurant has a hat collection:

And, here are all the answers you need for your questions about Chicken, AK.



But we had a goal and we were a ways from it so we had to move on.

As we climbed the hill above Chicken, we got a final look at the whole town. Small town. big personality. And, yes there is an airport in Chicken.