Top of the World Highway

After the Dempster, we found ourselves back in Dawson City, and found it hard to leave there. We went up Dome Mountain, and not only got to enjoy the incredible view of the Yukon merging with the Klondike...

...but discovered we were enjoying the view directly in front of a raspberry patch and so picked some berries for breakfast while we gawked.

SS also did some museum-going, though I settled for an external view of the cabin once lived in by gold rush-era poet Robert Service.

Somehow the whole day got away from us before we could finally bear to say goodbye to Dawson...

...and take one more ferry across the Yukon...

...in order to officially find ourselves on the Top of the World Highway. This twisty-turny feat of engineering is very aptly named, as it cruises mountaintops west into Alaska. But it is very difficult to photograph. Especially when there is clearly a wildfire burning that obscures a lot of the most dramatic views and turns the sky all kinds of crazy shades.

We crossed into Alaska for just a brief jaunt, where we...

...very much enjoyed the town of Chicken. They're really not shy about the chicken thing, even though we learned the original inhabitants wanted to name it for the ubiquitous ptarmigans in the area but found that word too difficult to spell.

Continuing south, we finally came across some spectacular caribou. In Chicken, we'd been chatted up by some hunters out looking for caribou, so when we spotted two caribou not a half-hour later, I told SS, "Take a picture, quick, before someone drives up and shoots them!" I was kind of kidding, but then another half-hour down the road, when this beautiful specimen trotted down the highway in front of us for a good quarter-mile, there was actually a pick-up full of extremely annoyed locals behind us. After we got our pictures and edged past the animal, encouraging it to leave the road and head off into the brush, we saw the people in the truck behind us fly into action, pulling off the road and pulling out their guns in hot pursuit. We don't want to know what happened after that.

Instead, we continued on into the beautiful, smoke-filled evening, leaving the Top of the World Highway but not this spectacular (if smoky) scenery.