Rev. 07/17/01
Alaska & beyond - continued 7/17
Tok, AK to Dawson YT
After getting the
RT serviced, I left Tok and went up the Taylor Hwy., through Chicken, Little
Chicken , Lost Chicken, and Boundary, to the Canadian border. Much
of it is dirt road and the stream it follows has had a gold dredge work it
over. Those who have lived in Idaho know what a barren gravel-scape
the dredges leave -- it is the same in Alaska and Canada.
There is still dredging going on, but it is the very small operators. A guy in a wet suit, working the pockets down to bedrock, hoping to find nuggets left there that the big dredge, the "Jack Wade," didn't get.
At Boundary, the last town before Canada, there isn't much, a log cabin and a gas station, mainly.
After passing through Canadian Customs, the road is called the "Top of the World Hwy." It stays up on the ridge line until it drops down the hill to Dawson. It is better maintained than on the US side, and is paved for the most part. The one log cabin on it has just about collapsed.
Big Class "A" RV's seem to love driving the narrow dirt road
from Tok to Dawson, but just get in back of a convoy of 5 or 6. You
might as well pull over and take a long nap.
Looking
down at Dawson from the hill on the west side of the river, you can easily
see where the clear water of the Klondike River meets the muddy Yukon.
Then when you get to the bottom of the hill -- there's no bridge. The Ferry, which plies the swift Yukon River, is run by the Yukon Territory and is free.
Dawson is a tourist town now. And most everything closes up for the winter.
A
major landmark at Dawson is the huge land slide on the hill just below the
town. I inquired about it and was told it was a mark for those floating
down river that they had finally come to Dawson. Geologist say that
the slide occurred four or five hundred years ago. And archeologists
say the story that it buried an Indian village, is just a story, not a
fact -- but it does make a good story.
Stopping at the Northwest Territories information center, I spoke to a pretty young lady who grew up in Inuvik. She'd just came down from there a few weeks ago. She was looking for "life out side of Inuvik," which is why many young people leave home. And we talked about that, and the strings that tend to pull one back -- it was an very interesting conversation.
I did find a good Chinese restaurant. I ordered scallops with vegetables, and a bowl of rice. When I asked for wooded chop sticks, the owner, Mr. Wing, ask where I was from. When I replied Honolulu, there was a big smile. He'd lived there, worked in Waikiki and lived in Kailua. The food was excellent.
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