Nome Home To Wild Life Alaska’s Mother Lode Of Frontier Culture Still Gives Birth To Dreams Of Gold

If Alaska could be worked like pay dirt for gold, most “cheechakos” (Alaska’s version of a greenhorn) would rightfully prospect in Denali National Park or the Arctic Refuge for prime nuggets of scenic wealth and wildlife. But the real sourdoughs know where to find the mother lode of Alaskan frontier culture: Nome.

Nome, in Alaska’s wild west, was born of an exodus from the Yukon’s Klondike, a stampede to the Bering Sea in which 20,000 men mined more than a million dollars in gold from its beaches nearly 100 years ago.

Today, with the population down to 5,000, miners still pitch tents on the dunes to sluice gold dust from garnet-red sands.

Inland, the country opens up as a living museum spanning a century of gold-mining technology. Improbable ditches follow valley contours while dilapidated gold dredges float like gray ghosts on the tundra. But there’s more to Nome and the surrounding Seward Peninsula than the relics of a mining heritage.

There’s wilderness more accessible than anywhere else in the state, where native hunter-gatherers still live off the land. Perhaps most unusual is the kind of social adventure found only on an active frontier. If the T-shirt slogan, “Alaska, land of the individual and other endangered species,” holds true, then Nome is the “hot spot” of rare and endangered Americans, the last of the frontier folk.

Huddled close to the Bering Sea on a treeless coastal plain, literally 50 miles from the nearest woodland, Nome unfolds as a grid of unpaved streets and boxy houses, many unpainted and weathered, a few dating back to the turn of the century when Nome was founded. The houses are packed close, as if to ward off the emptiness of the surrounding tundra or the merciless winds of winter, and the yards are gravel, with ancient dredge buckets full of hardy flowers.

Like all frontier communities, Nome’s a working man’s town, its economy grounded in gold. Nome smells of diesel and whiskey - diesel to work the gold from the earth, whiskey to wash away the day’s labors.

The laborers congregate at the many saloons and bars, social institutions matched in abundance only by houses of worship. On my visits to Nome, I always stop at the Board of Trade (B.O.T.), owned by Wyatt Earp at the turn of the century and purportedly once rated by Playboy magazine as one of the 25 roughest bars in the world, where woolly characters belly up to the bar.

Nome’s a forgiving place, a place where people can start over after a business deal or marriage turns ugly. It’s a place where people don’t ask about your past, but willingly share their own stories over a beer - people like Al Wiederolder. One afternoon in the Gold Dust Lounge, he told me how he followed a treasure map from Wisconsin, to Canada and finally to Nome.

On the beach just east of Nome, Wiederolder worked the red sands with a sluice box, a shovel and a small, portable, gasoline powered pump to run seawater over his diggings. “Shoveling robotically,” he recovered up to 2 ounces a day, worth about $700 at the time.

After two years on the beaches, Wiederolder found a half-ounce nugget near Anvil Creek, just three miles from town, prompting him to swap a Colt .45 for a metal detector and give up beach digging.

But for many, Nome’s beach is where the action is. Some years, tent after tent and rig after rig line up along it, whole families weathering the horizontal rain and chill subarctic summers (average temperatures for June, July and August are in the low 50s) until freeze-up in October shuts them down with temperatures that stay below freezing - and sometimes below zero - until “break-up” (the Alaskan spring) in May.

It’s easy to get bitten by the gold bug in Nome. The biggest gold nugget ever found in Alaska was plucked from Anvil Creek just outside Nome in 1903. It weighed 155 troy ounces and was 7 inches long, 4 inches wide and 2 inches thick. There’s still gold everywhere. You can pan it from the beach or the creeks in the mountains.

There’s even a sort of gold-prospecting theme park run by the Gold Prospectors Association of America (GPAA), where dudes from all over the world pay for a frontier version of Club Med. Except here they swagger for show with pistols and black hats, reliving the olden days of the stampede in an isolated camp 10 miles outside Nome.

Some people actively “snipe” gold off abandoned claims where old sluice boxes, dredges and other machinery hold rich dirt in nooks and crannies. But because most of the countryside is claimed or owned, newcomers to gold panning are better off signing up for a gold-panning tour or one of the GPAA’s one- to two-week recreational mining camps.

Aside from walking tours, bar visits, beach panning and stops to the visitor center and museum, a good trip to Nome means getting out of town. Mountain biking is a cost-effective form of transportation. Indeed, the mountain biking on the Seward Peninsula is among the best in the state, with hundreds of miles of RV-free gravel roads, mining trails, dry gravel ridges and river bars, and not a “no bikes allowed” sign anywhere. One fine ride (or walk) leads up Anvil Mountain four miles north and 1,000 feet above town.

Riding up for the panoramic view of Nome, sandwiched between the dredge-marked tundra and the Bering Sea, I met Matt Desalernos, training for the Iditarod Sled Dog Race, the 1,000-mile event that begins in Anchorage and ends in downtown Nome each March. Matt has run the Iditarod Race nine times, with his best finish of seventh place in 1993.

Like many long-term residents of Nome, Desalernos came for a season of work but stayed for 20 years, eventually taking a job as head engineer for the Alaska Gold Co. and becoming president of the Iditarod Trail Committee.

For Desalernos, the charms of Nome and the Seward Peninsula are “subtle, not spectacular like the Alaska Range. But the fishing’s real good for red salmon on the Sinuk River, silver salmon on the Solomon River and grayling on the Kuzitrin River. And the dog sledding in the hills is great in the winter.”

Nome has been home to many famous Iditarod racers, including Libby Riddles, first woman to win the grueling race. But even the housewives of Nome have ample opportunity to become heroes. Like Kathy Bue, a petite blonde whose husband Fred, is a biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Twelve years ago Fred presented Kathy with a Reuger .308 rifle as a wedding gift.

Last summer, Kathy and Fred, accompanied by their 5-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter, were clearing a beaver dam to let spawning salmon pass upstream near their cabin outside Council, 60 miles by gravel road east of Nome. As a fisheries biologist, Fred knows it’s important for the fish to get past this obstacle to reproduce.

Council, on the western limit of the continent’s boreal forest, is the weekend getaway spot for Nomites. It’s a place to fish or pick berries in summer, to ski and snowmobile in winter.

As Fred wrenched willow sticks free of the mud, Kathy spotted a 7-foot blond grizzly bear behind him. “Fred, there’s a bear stalking you,” she warned, just as the bear burst free of the brush and charged.

Fred jumped into the stream, stumbling across as the bear closed in with outstretched paws. Kathy reached for her rifle, brought it to her shoulder and, with a single shot, dropped the beast dead, right where Fred had been standing.

My visits have included plenty of wildlife. Along the coast, I’ve spotted walruses and seals porpoising through the gentle swells of Norton Sound and migrating bowhead whales blowing offshore in the distance.

In the hills there are reindeer, moose and musk ox. Last summer, swelling herds of Western Arctic caribou spilled onto the Seward Peninsula, mixing with herds of domestic reindeer. Native Eskimo reindeer herders lost many animals to these wild herds, since their reindeer were absorbed by the wild nomadic herds of caribou. The moose populations here have been among the biggest in the state, and the musk ox standing on gravel ridges in the mist look absolutely prehistoric.

The beaches, tundra and mountains within a couple hours’ drive of Nome offer plenty of animal-viewing possibilities. The Seward Peninsula is high on the list of American birders, eager to add birds like the Eurasian wryneck and Siberian accentor to their life lists, as no other North American land mass comes so close to Asia.

The Seward Peninsula is also the American side of the former Bering Land Bridge, passage for the ancestors of many plants, animals and peoples that now inhabit North America. Bering Land Bridge National Preserve protects the cultural and biotic heritage of “Beringia,” the Ice Age link between two continents. Its 2.7 million acres sprawl across the northern third of the peninsula, offering hardy and self-sufficient visitors a chance to explore stark lava fields, enchanted gardens of granite towers, bird rookeries, waterfowl nesting areas and primordial hot springs.

Closer to Nome are the Kigluaik Mountains, an hour north on the Kougarok road. Mount Osborn, highest on the Seward Peninsula, makes a good overnight hike and climb. An open valley leads past sparkling tarns, snow-fed streams and silver-leafed willows to a steep hike up a boulder field. At 4,714 feet, the view from Osborn’s spire-studded summit takes in central plains, U-shaped valleys, ridge after ridge of mountains and a huge inland saltwater lake, Imuruk Basin, home to a population of seals.

Beyond Mount Osborn, the Kougarok road climbs over the Kigluaik Mountains and past deep-blue Salmon Lake. Descending these Appalachian-sized mountains with their Rocky Mountain-sized cliffs and glaciers, the Kougarok road rolls across valleys and hills to end at Kuzitrin, 85 miles from Nome.

Besides the Kougarok road there are two other roads, Council Road and Teller Road. These three two-lane gravel roads, disconnected from the rest of the Alaskan highway system, offer no gas stations, restaurants, motels or main towns of any kind. Driving them is a true Alaskan adventure, so be prepared. Each takes a full day to drive out and back with some exploring along the way. Better yet is to camp overnight and return the next day.

Winding along the banks of the Solomon River, Council Road passes dredges, deserted mining camps and reindeer and musk-ox herds before climbing over a 2,000-foot pass to arrive at Council and the interior forest.

Teller Road leads three hours west to the Eskimo village of Teller, a small settlement of about 250 people that stretches along a sandy spit on the Bering Sea. The drive is wild, past flats spot lit with cloud-focused sunlight, multicolored hills of minerals and brush, a blue-walled canyon cutting into the tundra and miles of rolling hills.

Teller’s a private sort of place, so small that the visitor in a rental car might feel intrusive. But no worries: Turn around and head back, repeating to yourself, “There’s no place like Nome, there’s no place like Nome,” and the residents will welcome you home with open arms.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: IF YOU GO Even during the peak of the summer tourist season, Nome is subject to foul weather blowing off the Bering Sea, turning the streets to muddy puddles. Be sure to bring full waterproof gear, warm jackets and rubber boots. Even wool hats and gloves are useful in the rainy summer. The frontier demands attire more functional than formal. Nome gets several jet flights a day from Anchorage. Round trip is $400 to $500. A taxi from the airport to anywhere in town is $5. Once in Nome, a bicycle is a good way to travel (Inua Expeditions offers bike tours and rentals at (907) 443-4994, although cars can be rented, too. Four-wheel drives go for $85 per day, two-wheel drives for $75. Try Alaska Cab Garages at (907) 443-2939, or Stampede Rent-a-Car, (907) 443-3838. Gold pans can be bought in town if you want to try your hand at beach panning. There are also panning tours ($25, Nome Tour, (907) 443-2323) and the GPAA’s mining camps (a California-based outfit at (909) 699-4749). Flight-seeing charters fly over the countryside and to remote island and coastal villages like Savoonga, Diomede, Tin City and Wales. Try Cape Smythe Air Service at (907) 443-2414, or Olson Air Service, (907) 443-2229. Expect to pay $325 per hour for a passenger load of up to six. Prices for everything are very high in Nome, much higher than in Anchorage, Fairbanks or Juneau - a gallon of milk costs $5.19, for example. Accommodations are more typically Alaskan priced. We’ve stayed at the historic Gold Nugget Inn, the oldest hotel in Nome ($99.50 per double per night, (907) 443-2323), with an oceanside location and gold-mining memorabilia. Other hotels are also available, but we prefer the beds-and-breakfasts, like June’s B&B, (907) 443-5984, located in town and run by June Wardle, who was raised on a mining claim; or B&E B&B, (907) 443-3744. B&Bs are a good way to meet the people of Nome and they’re cheaper than the overpriced hotels. Make reservations far in advance because Nome gets crowded in the summer and fall. For more information about Nome, contact the Nome Convention and Visitors Bureau at (907) 443-5535.