Bybee's Travels

June 9 to June 12, 2012

We drove our cars to Chicken June 9th, with our picnic lunch. They were having a music festival called 'Chickenstock' there were tents and RV's everywhere with lots of music. Virginia Duysen had loaned me a book this past year. She had bought it when they made their Alaska trip. The name of it is Tisha, the pronunciation by the indians for Teacher. It's about a young girl going to Chicken, Alaska to teach school in the late 1920's. The school house and village remains are still there and I was interested to see it. It is privately owned and they give tours so we took it. We had a very good tour guide named Emily, she made it very interesting and had done some research on her own about the later life of Tisha.

Chicken post office

The school and living quarters. The
windows were added much later
by a mining company who owned
the property.

Emily, Darlene and Roy inside the
school room

Giant metal chicken statue

Tilting outhouse

The stage for Chickenstock

Our picnic lunch

I took a lot of pictures of the abandoned village but won't post them all. The tilting outhouse is an example of what has happened to most of the buildings. The sinking and tilting is caused from melting of the permafrost. If any building had heat it had caused them to sink. There was a building which had been used for storage of goods without heat and it was standing tall and unsunken.

We kept seeing through the Yukon especially, thin skinny, scrawny trees and wondered why. Finally after reading in our 'mile post' I learned that was also due to the permafrost. They are stunted black spruce, also called bog spruce or swamp spruce. They look young but are probably 100-150 years old.

This picture is out of focus (moving down the road)
but you can see how skinny and short they are.

June 10, we left Tok around 9am, destination Fairbanks. We finally saw a moose in time to get a picture, they really are elegantly, clumsy looking animals. We stopped in Delta Junction, the end of the Alaska Highway (Milepost 1422) We had lunch and took pictures and visited the Visitor's Information Building.