Top of the World Highway to Dawson City


Friday July 6
We slept till 8:20 because we were tired when we woke up to our alarm. Julie had a very hard time getting out of bed but we packed up our camp quickly and i got Shawn up to go get our free breakfast. I thought we could just grab it and go but it was a sit down thing while the hosts watched you eat... A marketing ploy to get the rest of the family that didn't win inside to buy breakfast. It was really good-2 huge sourdough pancakes, reindeer sausage and eggs. Shawn took forever to finish his because it was a big meal and he was distracted by everything going on in the building. It was $23 worth of breakfast but cost us quite a few hours of time- it was 10:30 before we left town. Julie and Joshua had our planned breakfast back at the campsite since there wasn't really anything on the menu that she could have with her dietary restrictions anyway.


The start of the top of the world highway was really steep right away. I turned onto it and couldn't get out of second gear for a couple miles. The space between second and third gear is really big on my car. 

There was a big fire in 2004 and things don't grow too quickly up here so that was interesting to see. 


At a roadside pullout there was a midsized semi pulling a small travel trailer which was quite funny to compare to the larger trailer that the small suv was towing back in dease lake.


The road was paved until the town of chicken,  but it was so rough that we had to drive pretty slow and we got to chicken after noon.
There was a big gift shop, gold panning stuff and a gas station. We had lunch there and then walked around. We went to the gold dredge and giant metal chicken. The metal chicken looked kinda dangerous for small kids- some students hacked their school lockers apart and built it.











We left town behind super slow guy pulling a trailer, he was going under 20kmh up the hill but i couldn't pass him until after he pulled over at the top. The road was all gravel after chicken and very slow going because the American side was super rough but there was lots to see. There were lots of small mines in the streams and lots of side roads to explore if you didn't have a trailer or big RV.

It was really nicely paved at boundary spur road near the boarder, some of the nicest pavement I have been on but i have no idea why it was paved there. The amazing views started at boundary spur road at the junction that goes north. We stopped for lots of pictures. When we were pulled over for photos one time some guys stopped and asked if we had seen an excavator. Someone from their crew was transporting a large excavator down the road and they had lost them...


There were so many amazing views, I tried to limit the photos I post here so there arent too many. There are 2 videos at the bottom of this post with lots of scenery. We have to come back and explore more sometime with a vehicle that we can actually explore with. Festivas are perfect for that but not with a trailer. 

We stopped at roadhouse that was closed.


The boarder crossing went well: the guy asked us to sign our passports, commented on the festiva being an odd choice of vehicle for Alaska, asked what we bought and let us go. 
The road was nice and smooth gravel until fairly close to Dawson we hit rougher pavement but nothing like on the American side.




Snow in July!!






We got the the ferry at Dawson and drove straight onto it because it wasn't busy and was loading our side around 8:15pm.
We drove all around town and there was no place to stay. Every store was either closed or sold out of ice as well, we eventually got it at hotel. The town was packed for a gold panning competition the next day. We went back across ferry and it was a super long wait of around an hour. Most of the campground on that side was full, only the bad sites were left (there were a lot of bad sites). We got the second last site that would be possible to park our trailer on. It wasn't level at all and the picnic table was quite an uphill hike but at least we had a place to stay. We didn't manage to get the kids to bed until 1:15am and we were in bed after 2am. It was a pretty crazy day.


This is my videocamera  video compilation of the top of the world highway:


This video is the dashcamera compilation of the drive:



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