Nome's Iditarod and the Lost Continent of Beringia: Alaska's Wild West on the Looney Front, Part 2

Nome's Iditarod and the Lost Continent of Beringia: Alaska's Wild West on the Looney Front, Part 2
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After its gold rush days, Nome won everlasting fame as the destination of the original Iditarod dog mushing race, although it was not called that back then. In 1925 a diphtheria epidemic raged in the town and the only way to save the inhabitants from a growing death toll was to get them the antitoxin serum.

The Alaska Territory governor prepared 20 pounds of the stuff, but regular boat would take 25 days to get through, while the two available planes were open cockpit affairs, useless in the sub-sub-zero mid-January temperatures and scant daylight hours. The only solution was that old standby of the Northland - dog sled and mushers.

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Nome - Front Street and Bering Sea

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Giant gold pan

The rest is history: 20 mushers and their dog teams brought the serum to Nome, covering 674 miles from Nenana on the Alaska Railroad through whiteout blizzards, gales of 80 mph, and a mercury plummetting to -64 degrees Fahrenheit in six days.

For their pains, they received a thank-you from President Calvin Coolidge, a medal, and 50 cents for each mile. Balto, the lead dog on the final lap, got his lovely self a statue in New York's Central Park, and Nome got itself a March carnival.

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A breezy corner on the sea front

In 1973, the annual Iditarod mushing race was started in commemoration, officially covering 1,049 miles from Anchorage, with the record now standing at eight days, 13 hours, four minutes and 19 seconds.

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Iditarod marker

The first race was won by Dick Wilmarth in 20 days, 49 minutes and 41 seconds, but his lead dog Hot Foot ran away at the finishing line. Fourteen days later, it romped into Wilmarth's home in Red Devil, 500 miles from Nome. OMD!

Iditarod comes from the Ingalik (Yupi'ik) word Hidedhod for distant place, the name of a river along which gold was found in 1908, and the finish gate is kept by the side of Front Street right by the old red light district, ready to be trotted out across the roadway every March.

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Iditarod gate bides its time on the roadside

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close-up

Nome is also home to the headquarters of the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve, only about 100 miles away, where the ice age drained out the sea between here and Siberia, allowing non-endemic animals and the first American humans to cross over into the New World.

Far from being a narrow connection as some might assume, the bridge was over 1,000 miles wide, in effect a lost continent, an ice-age Atlantis now referred to as Beringia, named after Vitus Bering, the Danish explorer who prowled these waters on behalf of Russia.

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Close to the once and future continent of Beringia

Millennia before he bequeathed his name to the surrounding sea, during the last ice age, the waters were over 400 feet lower, exposing a vast land mass between Asia and the Americas. Being cold but dry, it was covered not with ice but with grassland fertilised with natural phosphates and other chemicals blowing off the glaciers.

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Another view

Thus were huge herbivore creatures such as the woolly mammoth enticed across by this cordon bleu banquet, along with the predators who turned the herbivores into their own cordon bleu nosh up.

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Mammoth skeleton mockup - Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre in Whitehorse

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Side view

These included the now also extinct massive short-faced bear, standing 13 feet tall and weighing in at over 1,500 pounds, the large Americanised lion, the sharp-toothed scimitar car - and the most destructive beast of all, that not-yet-extinct little weasel called humans.

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Near Beringia

Interestingly horses, which originated in America as a much smaller creature than today's steeds, went the other way into Asia and Europe along an earlier iteration of the land bridge millions of years ago.

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Another view

Anyway, the point of all this natter is that Yours Truly is not going to the most immediate remnants of the once and future continent (pending the next ice age) of Beringia since it costs an arm and a leg to get up there by chartered plane.

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And another

But I can still mosey around the environs of Nome to get the lay of the land, so to speak, where all these creatures must have passed, especially as once again the sun is shining brightly this mid-June day, even though it's only 48 degrees Fahrenheit, and feels much colder thanks to a strong chilly wind.

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Nome's environs

And who better to take one round in his van than Richard Beneville, a one-time singer, actor and dancer from New York 'until alcohol devastated me as it does the natives here,' who ran aground in Nome decades ago, now runs Nome Discovery Tours, won the 2005 local Gold Panner of the Year award, and created the local vaudeville drag personality, Nome River Sally.

Though Nome is flat by the Bering Sea shore, and it might be all white in winter, there are endless undulating waves inland of brilliant iridescent greens in a myriad shades, enhanced by yellow lichen, stretching as far as the eye can see to craggy snow-streaked peaks.

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Around Nome

The tiny spring flowers are just beginning to bloom in deep carmine, fluorescent purple, forget-me-not blue, bright yellow and a hundred variations in-between. The minuscule under-foot forests on the spongey tundra glisten from deep emerald to deeper red, and the whole is meant to be as resplendent in autumn as New England with the entire palette of fall colours.

Nome's Bouquet

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We pass grazing musk oxen with their calves, and the Anvil Mountain Correctional Centre with its 150 inmates - mostly indigenous people for alcoholism, domestic violence and sexual abuse. The Hard Rock goldmine is still piling away, and at another Captain Bob is taking time off from the 24-hour daylight to go to his 13-year-old son's softball game.

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Musk oxen

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Zoom in

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Drilling for gold

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Gold mine works in the hollow

Holiday chalets including Mongolian-style yurts abut the snaking Nome River, all very rustic. And don't forget those butt-heads of birders, for this is peak - or should that be freak - season, Nome being on a major global trans-migration routes. In WWII, it was the fulcrum of a different sort of aerial migration when some 8,000 planes were sent to the Soviet Union in a lend-lease programme.

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Holiday homes

On a ridge near Anvil Mountain, the ugly concave panels of giant radar dishes testify to Nome's significance in the DEW line, the Distant Early Warning system girding Alaska and northern Canada to warn of any sneak Soviet attacks during the Cold War. On a nearby ridge present-day wind turbines spin away.

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DEW line

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Close-up

Back in town what better way to pass the time than to sit in the warm Polar Café gazing out from its picture windows onto the vastness of the grey-blue Bering Sea glistening in the brilliant sunshine, gold dredges sifting away on the horizon, snow white gulls dive-bombing the waters closer to shore.

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Gold dredge in Bering

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Another

But back in my inn room it's all brilliant light. If I have one complaint it's the need for a thick black-out curtain. This being the land of the midnight sun, it's midnight and the blazing sun is burning right through the flimsy covering.

[Upcoming blog on Sunday: On the Yukon/Klondike gold rush trail along the Top of the World Highway]

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View over Nome

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Looking the other way

______________
By the same author: Bussing The Amazon: On The Road With The Accidental Journalist, available with free excerpts on Kindle and in print version on Amazon.

Swimming With Fidel: The Toils Of An Accidental Journalist, available on Kindle, with free excerpts here, and in print version on Amazon in the U.S here.

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