At the end of the trail a new adventure starts
The first inhabitants of the area around Eagle were the Han. In the late 800s, the small town of Eagle became an important supply and trading center for miners working the upper Yukon River area. Eagle’s population peaked in 1898 to 1,700 when many newcomers journeyed to the area with the Klondike Gold Rush.
We spent the night just a few miles after the intersection of Taylor and Top of The World Highways.
There are two versions for how the town of Chicken got its name.
The first is based on the fact that settlers and miners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who relied on the abundant Alaska state bird, the ptarmigan, for food. They could not agree on the spelling of “ptarmigan” when the town needed an official name. To avoid embarrassment and confusion, they settled on “Chicken”, which was much easier to spell. The second theory suggests it was named after Chicken Creek, named for the “chicken feed”-sized gold found there.
Taylor Highway runs between Tetlin Junction and the historic town of Eagle at the margin of the Yukon river.
The first day of our road trip we travelled between Tetlin and Jack Wade passing through Chicken village
We left Fairbanks on the 22nd. A small mechanical problem with the truck, that was temporarily resolved with duct tape, required us to return to Fairbanks right after driving through Tok.
We stayed in Fairbanks for the weekend, and on Monday got the mechanical issue resolved. We also took the opportunity to replace our windshield that had many rock chips.
The Poker Flat Research Range is a launch facility and rocket range for sounding rockets in the U.S. state of Alaska, located on a 5,132 acre site at Chatanika, about 30 miles northeast of Fairbanks and 1.5 degrees south of the Arctic Circle.
Goldstream Dredge No. 8 is a ladder dredge operated by the Fairbanks Exploration Company from 1928 to 1959.
Pioneer Park is a 44-acre city park in Fairbanks, Alaska, United States run by the Fairbanks North Star Borough Department of Parks and Recreation. The park commemorates Alaskan history with multiple museums and historic displays.
We visited also the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysics Institute
We visited The University of Alaska Fairbanks Museum of the North.
