The settlers named it Chicken because they couldn’t spelled ptarmigan, a bird that was one of their mainstays for survival. Pretty much everything here has that same “tongue in cheek” feel. The community is actually three separate properties about 1/4 mile from each other owned by three families.

Two are RV parks, one with the original Chicken buildings its site, and the other with the Pedro dredge. The third has 4 newer buildings constructed to look old called, Beautiful, Downtown Chicken – including a gift shop, bar, cafe and an outhouse called the Chicken Poop. We spent a night at the Gold Creek Camp and Outpost. As we pulled in, the first thing we saw were 2 long, waist-high wooden boxes near a big pile of dirt that people were using to pan for gold. For $10, you can even go to the claim owned by the RV camp where “you can actually find nuggets the size of your finger!”

We met a few folks from the Gold Prospectors Association — a large caravan of their fellow members would be arriving in the next few days — who showed us the correct way to pan for gold. Sure enough, we saw them pull gold flakes out of that big pile of dirt!

I looked across camp and noticed a man standing in an unusal looking boat on a trailer. As he sat down and started the big airboat-like blade spinning, I was thinking, “They certainly do things differently here in Chicken!”