Why Chicken, Alaska?

Chicken Post Office

As a child, I remember discovering Chicken, Alaska on a military map with my best friend, Peet McCain. Chicken didn’t appear on the average travel map that you used for long, family road trips. I soon became obsessed with this far away land and wanted to learn more about it. After calling Alaska directory assistance repeatedly on my high school radio show, I quickly realized that no one really knew of this place, not even the local phone operators. We were put on hold for several minutes while they tried to locate the town in their system. It turns out there was no established phone service! How odd! And as of the most recent census of 2000, there are still only 17 people living there (consisting of 4 families). There is a post office as you can see in this picture, but still no phone service! However, after years of calling to see if we could establish contact with someone there, Chicken Alaska can now be found on just about any road map. We take personal pride that we were somehow responsible for putting Chicken on the map. So while we would love to visit there someday, it is not really a convenient drive so we instead decided to send Tisha Chicken there in our place. We will be launching her into the wild on August 30, 2009. Check back for the video of the historic event!