Dawson City to Inuvik - Alaska and Points North: Tips and Tales from the Road - page 183

There is also a massive old gold dredge beached at the edge of town - Pedro Dredge No 4.
You can find out more about it at the nearby Chicken Gold Camp & Outpost. The Milepost
calls this camp an “idyllic resort.” That is as much of a stretch as calling some of these dirt
tracks highways. It is just another RV park. But it does have a cafe and there are signs say-
ing you can pan for gold and book tours of the local area with them.
We'd decided on the more picturesque looking Chicken Creek Café for lunch: homemade
burgers and pie. We were so impressed with the quality of the food that we took some cin-
namon rolls away with us - made by the teenaged boy running the grill.
Calling the town Chicken is a bit odd. The story goes that the townspeople had wanted to
call the town after the area's most prolific resident, the ptarmigan bird. But no one knew
how to spell “ptarmigan” so they settled on Chicken. Ptarmigan were much beloved by the
early settlers because they stuck around all year, providing a constant food source. They
are the size of a chicken, but slower and stupider. I'm told they just stand still and wait to
be caught.
No one ploughs the road in winter so it is closed from mid-October to April, isolating the
15 people who live here year round. They don't seem to mind. The cafe owner told me that
summers are so busy she looks forward to the winter months when she can get something
done.
In February they organize a snowmobile rally with hundreds of riders going over the top
from Dawson City, Yukon to Tok, Alaska. That's a rugged 300 km /185 mi route that
crosses the US/Canada border. Signage posted everywhere sternly warns that it is illegal to
cross the US/Canada border without checking into customs. That despite the fact that the
border station is not even open from May through October. That is the lonely little border
station below: