Driving Above the Clouds: A Guide to the Top of the World Highway

The drive

From Dawson City you first cross the Yukon River by the free George Black ferry, running mid-May to mid-October, then climb onto a ridge road that stays high, with tundra falling away on both sides and views that seem to run forever. It's 105 kilometres of mostly gravel to the Alaska border, continuing on as the Taylor Highway on the US side toward Chicken and eventually Tok.

The border crossing

The Poker Creek–Little Gold Creek crossing is the northernmost land border between Canada and the US, and it sits at roughly 4,100 feet elevation, one of the highest border crossings anywhere on the continent. It keeps limited seasonal hours, typically 9 am to 7 pm Yukon time, which is 8 am to 6 pm Alaska time, seven days a week. That one-hour time difference is exactly why you'll see the hours quoted two different ways depending on the source, so double check which time zone you're reading. Time your drive to arrive within those hours, carry your passport, and remember that the ferry and the border both close outside the season, stranding the route entirely if you misjudge it.

On the US side, Poker Creek's own population fluctuates between two and three people depending on staffing needs, making it one of the smallest border posts anywhere.

When it's open

This is a summer-only road, generally passable from mid-May to mid-September, though exact opening and closing dates shift year to year depending on snow. It's closed and unmaintained in winter. Even in summer, weather at elevation can turn fast, and fog or rain makes the gravel slick and the views vanish, so pick a clear day if you can.

Preparation

Treat it like any remote gravel route: full tank, good tires and a spare, food, water, and warm layers. There are essentially no services along the way on the Yukon side. Drive to the conditions, watch for washboard and soft shoulders, and don't rush the switchbacks.

An old dredge along the way

Once you're into Alaska and approaching Chicken, keep an eye out for the Pedro Dredge, a genuine gold dredge built in 1938 and moved to Chicken in 1959, where it worked until 1967. It's still standing today as the centerpiece of the Chicken Gold Camp and is listed as a National Historic Site, a solid, tangible stop if the scale of gold rush-era mining interests you.

Chicken, Alaska

Chicken is about as small and as colourful as towns get, home to just a handful of year-round residents and a summer population that swells with miners and travellers passing through. Local legend has it that early miners wanted to name the place after the ptarmigan, a common local bird, but couldn't agree on how to spell it, and settled on Chicken instead since the two birds look similar enough. It's a great story, and it's the one everyone tells, though it's worth knowing historians aren't entirely convinced it's true rather than a colourful tale that caught on later.

Every June, Chicken hosts Chickenstock, a two-day music festival that draws a genuinely large crowd for such a tiny place. Outside festival weekend, the town is just a few small businesses and a lot of character, the kind of place where everyone you meet has a story about how they ended up there.

Why do it

The payoff is a driving experience unlike almost any other, hours spent literally on top of the landscape, with tundra and sky in every direction. Paired with Dawson City on one end and Chicken on the other, it makes an unforgettable leg of a far-north road trip.

This stretch is also one leg of a genuinely popular circuit known as the Klondike Loop: Whitehorse to Dawson City, across to Alaska via this highway, down through Chicken to Tok, then back to Whitehorse along the Alaska Highway. Extend it further through Kluane country and Haines Junction on the way back, and it's sometimes called the Klondike-Kluane Loop. Either direction works, and most people take several days to do it properly rather than rushing straight through.