I wanted to go to Nabesna. I wanted to camp in the woods and go hiking and be in a place with very few people and very large mountains. To this end, I went to the National Park visitor centre and borrowed a bear-proof food container, which you have to have if you’re going to camp in the park. Then I walked outside, stuck out my thumb and within twenty minutes got picked up by Patrick, a guy in his fifties in a battered old RV.

“Where are you headed?” I asked him when he pulled over.

“Chicken,” he said.

“Ooh,” I said. “Can I come?”

“Sure,” he said. “Get in.”

The town of Chicken is famous for being a strange place. It’s way up north, not far from the Canadian border, but not on the Alaska-Canada highway which takes the majority of traffic in the region, so it exists in its own little bubble. The town was actually supposed to be called Ptarmigan after the Alaskan state bird which is common in the area but the semi-literate gold miners who had founded the town couldn’t spell Ptarmigan so they went with Chicken because it was easier. The year-round population of Chicken is 17.

I had tried, and failed, to get to Chicken twice in my life already. The first time was on my bicycle tour when I was twenty. I wanted to cycle up there from Tok but forest fires had closed the road. The second time was on a hitchhiking trip to the Canadian Arctic a year later. I wanted to hitch the Top of the World highway from Dawson City but forest fires had closed that road too. Now, despite my intention to go to Nabesna, and despite the large, heavy bear-proof food container I had just squeezed into my rucksack, I couldn’t say no to that ride.

“Why are you going to Chicken?” I asked Patrick as I threw my stuff into his RV.

“There’s a bluegrass festival there this weekend,” he said.

“Cool,” I said.

“It’s called Chickenstock.”

I laughed and we were on our way. We didn’t talk much on the six-hour journey. Instead, we listened to Patrick’s eclectic music selection. At one point, I told him I liked what was playing. “Who is this?” I asked.

“Gary Burton,” he said. Evidently, I looked blanker than I should have done at the name. Patrick looked sideways at me. “Are you a jazz fan?” he asked.

“I like it but I don’t listen to it much so I’m not very knowledgeable,” I said honestly.

“He’s an elder,” he explained. “A vibraphone player. He inducted a lot of the younger generation into the fold.”

We arrived at Chickenstock a little after ten pm in the beaming sunshine. On the festival stage, a man in a chicken suit was leading a crowd of enthusiastic revellers through the chicken dance. Patrick went off to park his RV and I climbed up a nearby grassy knoll to set up my tent.

Tent on the grassy knoll. Gotta love the light at 11pm!

As I was setting up my tent, I got chatting to the lady camped next to me, who was from relatively-nearby Fairbanks. She pointed at the Chicken Saloon opposite our tents. “They’ll fire off a cannon every so often,” she told me. “It’ll be full of people’s underwear.”

“Good to know,” I replied.

Near my tent was all sorts of chicken-related stuff and a few gold-mining buildings.

Yes, that’s a giant chicken and a sign listing the distances to other places in the world with chicken-related names.

Gold-mining building with tents.

I sat on the hill and listened to the music for a while, then went for a walk to stretch my legs after the long drive. It didn’t take me long to see most of Chicken.

This is most of Chicken.

Welcome to Historic Downtown Chicken.

Feeling pretty tired, I went to bed around 2 am, though I was wakened every so often when the cannon went off with a mighty BOOM and a raucous cheer went up from the bar.

I spent the next day at the festival, listening to good music, making friends, including Danny and Tom who had flown out from Anchorage in Danny’s little plane and who will appear again in this story later, and playing with rubber chickens in the sunshine. Before the day was out, I bought myself a lousy t-shirt to commemorate the occasion.

Who am I kidding? This t-shirt is awesome.

Total distance hitchhiked: 1,432 km.
Total number of rides: 11.

Chelsea dropped me at the library in Glennallen on her way back to work. I spent a couple of hours updating my blog then went off in search of denatured alcohol for my stove. I tried the pharmacy, who were sold out, then walked a mile or so to a truck stop and tried there. They didn’t have any but directed me to a store about 5 miles to the south which might do.

“Are you on foot?” the lady in the truck stop asked me as I turned to leave. I nodded. “How are you going to get there?”

“I’ll hitchhike,” I said. She looked profoundly sceptical. “It’s no problem,” I assured her, then walked outside, stuck out my thumb and got picked up within thirty seconds by a guy in a large pick-up truck.

“Where are you headed?” he asked as I jumped inside.

“Nowhere in particular,” I said. “But the lady in there told me I might be able to get alcohol for my camping stove from the store in Tazlina.”

“I know the place,” he said. “I’ll take you there.”

He introduced himself as Gene, a retired welder originally from North Dakota. It was a funny coincidence picking me up, he said, because he’d met a British couple only a week before, at a restaurant in town. They’d got talking and the couple were waxing lyrical about the salmon salad they had ordered. “You call that salmon?” Gene had told them, looking at the puny portion of fish in their salad. “I could eat that four times over.” He had invited them back to his house to eat some proper salmon and apparently they couldn’t believe how good the fish was.

“I live down by the Copper River,” Gene said to me as he pulled into the store at Tazlina. “I’ve got space on my land for you to camp and I’ve got a fishwheel. Fancy coming and staying at my place for a couple of nights?”

“Sure,” I said. “That would be great.” (If you read my previous post ‘Out of Valdez’, you’ll recall that I wrote “We drove towards Chitina alongside the Copper River, which contains probably the best salmon on the planet.” And here I was being offered some of that salmon. You’d have said yes, too!)

Once again, I couldn’t find any denatured alcohol at the store. We drove another ten miles to get to Gene’s house. “This is a big truck you’ve got, Gene,” I said as we drove.

He laughed. “Yeah, but I’ve got a bigger one,” he said, and he wasn’t kidding. There were all sorts of vehicles on his property: pick-up trucks of various vintages, RVs, four-wheelers, a little bobcat digger and even a hovercraft he’d picked up a few months before.

Everyone should have a hovercraft, clearly.

He invited me into his kitchen and we sat there for the rest of the evening, chatting away about all sorts of things. He was a keen hunter and fisherman, had the head of a caribou he’d shot hanging on his wall, owned “at least thirty” guns and fed me that evening on a burger made from the meat of a moose he’d killed a few months before. It tasted great, but the real food experience was to come the next day.

Stuffed caribou.

In the morning, he went out to check his fishwheel, which had a couple of red salmon in it. If you’ve never seen a fishwheel, I took a video of it going round a few times. It’s quite hypnotic and you can watch it for hours. The mechanism is simple but effective. As the salmon swim upstream, they get scooped up by the fishwheel and slide off into the basket. Then all you have to do is pick them up and eat them.

To avoid overfishing, each named person on the wheel is limited to 200 red salmon per year, which is still a lot of fish. Gene’s wheel had his own name and a friend of his as well, so after they had caught 400, they’d have to take the wheel out of the water. Several times while I was there, a woman from the Alaska Fish and Game department came round to check the wheel. They’re very strict about this kind of thing.

Gene on his fishwheel with a red salmon.

Gutting the fish on the banks of the river. It doesn’t come any fresher than this!

Removing the head.

This is the colour a salmon should be, not the crappy pink stuff we get at home. (Incidentally, I’ve heard it from several authorities out here that the flesh of the farmed Atlantic salmon we get back home is actually colourless and they have to dye it pink. Needless to say, Gene’s red salmon did not need to be dyed.)

During the day, I helped Gene out a very modest amount by holding a few things while he screwed together the trailer he was making for his new hovercraft. It was a nice day out in the sunshine. Later on, he had a few friends over and we had a barbeque by the river.

No need for seasoning with fish this fresh. Just straight on the barbeque. Beans are always great, though.

That’s a big ol’ pile of fish. I went back for seconds, and thirds, and maybe fourths as well.

Mmmmm.

Food just doesn’t come better than that fish. Really as good as it gets. After a very pleasant two night stay, and after some moose sausage for breakfast, Gene dropped me at the nearby national park visitor centre and I continued on my journey, feeling justified in telling the lady at the truck stop that hitchhiking would be no problem.

Total distance hitchhiked: 1,067 km.
Total number of rides: 10.

The day after the hike on top of the Root Glacier, both Bradie and Diana were off work and they took me for a hike out to an ice cave underneath Kennicott Glacier. Once again, just enjoy the pictures.

Mouth of the ice cave. The whole cave must have been 300 feet long, with a conveniently placed ledge to walk on the whole way.

Warped walls.

Ice hanging over the river running through the cave.

Not a bad view out the back of the cave.

It was actually a two-storey ice cave.

Apparently, this line used to be a crevasse that closed up again.

A couple of days later I took Chelsea and doctor Matt on the same hike out to the ice cave. We were sitting just over a pile of moraine, letting some other people have their moment enjoying the view, when there was suddenly the most enormous rumbling noise and we ran up to see that the entire mouth of the cave had fallen in. Fortunately, nobody was inside when it happened.

We sat around outside the cave for another hour or so afterwards in the hope of seeing more drama but we were out of luck. As we hiked back out, we weren’t sure which emotion we felt the strongest: relief at not having been crushed to death inside the cave, or frustration at having been so close to the collapse without actually seeing it happen! Such is life, I guess.

This caved in two days after I took this photo. Would have been a nasty way to die.

A couple of days after I arrived in McCarthy, Bradie was off work and took me for a hike on top of Root Glacier. I’m not going to bother writing anything else about it, just look at the photos.

Bradie leads the way.

River on the glacier. I’ve never tasted better water than I got from a spot not far from here. Pure as crystal.

Erosion.

Epic weather.

Pretending I know what to do with that ice axe.

And on the way back, a great view of the crumbling old mill buildings of Kennecott.