Nome, Alaska on the Bering Sea

A view of Nome from the air.

​There are no roads to Nome, Alaska, so we left the rig behind and flew to this small city on the Bering Sea.   The town itself was created after gold prospectors arrived in the late 1890s. 

The miners who settled Nome are remembered in this display in the town square.

​The gold prospectors found Native groups of Yupik and Inupiac who lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, hunting seals, walrus and whales and gathering berries, willow and other plants during the long, sunny days of summer and into the fall.

Reindeer -- and reindeer antlers -- are a big part of Native life.

​In the hundred and sixteen years since Nome’s founding, settlers and Natives have managed to develop a small economy but one still plagued by scarce resources and jobs.  To our surprise, the search for gold still attracts many people who scour the bottom of the ocean for bits on the precious metal. Vacuum-equipped boats and scuba divers have replaced the dredging machines of old.

This dredger would pull silt up from the riverbed and extract gold from the dirt.

Today, scuba divers go out into the ocean on these boats equipped with vacuums to suck up the ocean floor for gold.

​Food, clothing, vehicles and other supplies are shipped in via boat or plane. Scarce building supplies means the houses are slapped together with odds and ends, giving the town a rundown look.

Note the moose antlers and snow shoes on the wall.

​The presence of the Native people gives Nome a special quality.  In town, many suffer the consequences of alcoholism and unemployment while others work to keep alive their traditions of dance and carving spirits into walrus ivory and bone. We attended a cultural evening with traditional dancers and singers.

Vehicles are few and far between, but with luck, we rented a work truck and headed out into the tundra, broad rolling hills with no trees that is covered with lichen and moss and, at this time of year, acres of berries. 

A river full of salmon flows through the tundra.

​We did not see any bears but did find muskox, like this fellow on the roadside.

A musk ox near Safety, Alaska.

​At Pilgrim Hot Springs we explored an old Catholic mission and orphanage where many children lived 100 years ago after influenza and tuberculosis killed many of the adults.  

The old Catholic mission at Pilgrim Hot Springs.

A nun painted this mural above the altar in the church at the hot springs.

​The next day we drove 70 miles out on one of the three dirt roads connecting Nome to Native settlements.  The roads are not plowed in the winter and only snow mobiles are used for transportation during those months.  We drove through hills of tundra and rivers packed with salmon that were fighting their way upstream to lay their eggs.

​The town of Teller is a Native village, where people dry their fish on traditional racks on the ocean-side.  Many Natives still spend summer months in fish camps by the water, where the fish and berries are plentiful and where they can hunt caribou and moose.

Salmon is drying on a traditional rack in Teller, Alaska.

​Few people have cars, but most of them have snow mobiles and four-wheelers for getting around town. 

No cars but four snowmobiles at this typical Teller, Alaska home.

​Back in Nome, we checked out the music of the Salmonberry Folk Festival, where the Anchorage-based band Super-Saturated Sugar Strings led a music jam at the famed Safety Roadhouse, the Last Check Point of the Iditarod race.

A summer afternoon jam at the Safety Roadhouse.

​Four days in Nome gave us a glimpse of this remote corner of America and a way of life that harkens back to a way of life thousands of year old, when people learned how to survive in the frigid, but not really barren, land.