The plan was to take as many of the red roads on the Milepost map as possible. So coming in from Dawson, you hit Chicken, and then you just have to go to Eagle. At the bottom of one hill, we saw a familiar VW Vanagon with its front end hanging at a painful angle. Poor VW Vanagon folks. I hope things went better for them.

Eagle Alaska is on the Yukon River. The ice broke up one year, but then dammed up and flooded the whole area. The local native village has since been moved. But most of the town is pretty much where it used to be. At one point, Eagle was the telegraph station for all of Alaska. There was a fort to keep the lines repaired. They have some of the old buildings restored. And the BLM campground there is plenty cool. A bunch of Scouts was working at the BLM fort. They had come to canoe the Yukon River up to Circle. But the trailer that carried all their stuff had broken when it got to the bottom of a hill. So while the scouts were digging trenches for the fort, the BLM guy was helping the scoutmaster move all their equipment into a van to get it to the campground so they could leave on their trip! It was so exciting!!! Anyway, once they were done ditch digging, they got a tour of the fort, and Mary and Lucy and I got to tag along. That night when the equipment showed up at the campground I helped move some of the water for them. Team effort! In return, the scoutmaster told me stories of putting up a telephone radio tower in Wiseman north of Livengood.

The gas station in Eagle didn’t take credit cards, and I didn’t have enough cash to buy gas. Once it became clear to me that we weren’t going to make it to Chicken, I desperately remembered that I had 10 gallons of gas on the roof, and poured that into the tank. So the expensive Canadian gas from Ft McPherson came to good use.

The scouts were going to get out of the water at Circle on July 6, I think. We were heading to Circle too but got there too early. It was another cool, driving off the edge of the world drive. Circle was a mining town that got misnamed because they thought they were on the Arctic Circle, but really they were about 45 miles south. It’s on the Yukon River, mostly a native fishing village. They have a free campground right at the river. Because it was July 4, though, that’s where they had the Independence Party raging. Folks came from all over. The drummer came down from Ft Yukon in his boat. He picked up 2 castaways along the way. They’d been coming to Circle too, but had problems. After walking along the shore (which is difficult and exhausting) they had given up hope, and then his boat showed up full of a drumset. The music went on until maybe 2:30 in the morning. It didn’t sound too bad. But I couldn’t really tell you. We’d parked at the village washeteria and gone fast asleep.

Then we headed out to Chena Hotsprings but didn’t stay there. There were fires along the way. Some campgrounds were closed. Some were burnt up. It was… interesting.