By John Masters

Meridian Writers’ Group

CHICKEN, Alaska—It doesn’t have electricity, phone service, a paved road or indoor plumbing, but there is a post office (since 1903) and you can get an espresso. And lots of souvenirs.

Chicken began as a gold-rush town in the 1890s, around the same time as the neighbouring Yukon’s more famous Dawson City, 171 kilometres [107 miles] to the northeast along the packed-dirt Taylor Highway and the paved Top of the World Highway.

It never flourished as Dawson did, but never died entirely, either—there’s still gold to be had hereabouts. When Susan Wiren and her partner bought “downtown Chicken” in 1989—a bar and a café—its patrons were a rough crowd. “I was afraid to walk into the place,” she recalls. She cleaned out the rowdies and added a gift shop. In it you can buy an array of mementos, many containing the word “chicken”: t-shirts, suspenders, toques, golf balls, and, for the cheeky, condoms that say, “I got laid in Chicken, Alaska.”

Wiren and her partner (who was once her husband, but now tends goats in France) had come to Alaska in 1988 to try subsistence living. “He was gold mining and trapping and I was picking berries,” she says. The charm of that took only one winter to wear off, and Chicken beckoned.

But Wiren, who had previously managed a bookstore in New Jersey (“I met Isaac Asimov”), was good at merchandising, not running a café. She had to teach herself how to cook, bake and make soup. Now the café counter is lined with the pies she gets up at 4 a.m. to make. The cherry pie is especially good, and so is the chili.

She also had to attract more clientele during the short summer season when the Taylor Highway is maintained. After cleaning up the four Wild West-style storefronts of downtown Chicken—the “mercantile emporium,” the liquor store, the saloon and the café—she pitched them as a colourful stop-off for Holland America cruise passengers who were also doing a land tour. The company bit, so between mid-May and early September upwards of 12,000 people get off the buses in her dirt parking lot.

That makes her enterprise viable, but not easy. “We move them through really fast,” she says. “Holland America wants them to be satisfied in 30 minutes. We had 67 in this morning; usually we get two groups a day.”

She does stay open after the buses stop “because it’s moose season,” but only another few weeks. Then the town shuts and its population drops to five—not including Wiren anymore. She now winters Fairbanks and plays tennis there until spring.

Wiren’s success has spawned competitors, including the nearby Chicken Gold Camp & Outpost, with cabins and camping. It’s also where you get your espressos. Wiren doesn’t offer them because she says she’d go nuts trying to make them for a busload of people in under 30 minutes.

Oh, and why’s it called “Chicken”? The miners wanted to name it after the ptarmigan, plentiful in the area. They couldn’t spell it.

Explore More

For more information on downtown Chicken visit Sue Wiren’s website at www.chickenalaska.com.

For information on travel in Alaska visit the Alaska Travel Industry Association website at www.travelalaska.com.