Alaska 2024: Roll 12 - Chicken and Tok
We woke up to rain in Dawson City so we didn't have a chance to run in the morning. When you leave Dawson City heading to the border crossing back into the United States, you have to take a small ferry over the Yukon River. This doesn't take long at all but is a fun adventure to start off the day.
The drive to the border crossing and then down to the settlement of Chicken, Alaska was mostly in the rain and in the clouds so there wasn't much to see other than a bit of white knuckle driving and trying to see in front of you the Suburban just far enough so that you stayed on the road. At least there wasn't much traffic that early in the day.
For this roll I decided to shoot another of my Kodak 250d rolls. Because of the lower light due to the cloudy morning, I decided not to use the center filter for the 30mm lens. It is a tradeoff because if you don't have the filter, you will have some falloff on the edges of the frame. If you do use the filter, you run the risk of not having enough light to expose the images at a shutter speed that you can handhold. Because I'm shooting this film at ISO 200 I decided to give myself a bit more light.
Around the gas station named The Goldpanner, we wandered around looking at the sights, the old mining equipment, and a cool suspension bridge that really wobbled up and down when you walked across it.
There was another dragline that you could walk around. This one was not as big as the previous days but still interesting to see the scale of these machines.
The metal chicken and the signposts for many places around the world makes for a nice memorable picture from the stop.
After lunch in a roadside park that had a ton of mosquitos, we met up with the Alaskan Highway again and mad our way another hour or so down the road to Tok.
Along the way we stopped to look at the rivers that we were crossing. These rivers are something else up here. They were very wide, very muddy and silty, and were really moving. I imagine they were also quite cold.
Our stay that night was in a cabin that turned out to be cute and well furnished. We hung out on the porch, went to the grocery store and bought some microwave burritos that weren't very good and I walked around a bit to take some photos.
I like how these images from Tok turned out. The color seemed very nice and feels just like it felt when I was there. The fun part of the images is that they were probably nearly 8:00 at night, the sun wasn't going down anytime soon.