There's No Place Like Nome...

Nome, Alaska. On the farthest edge of the planet, or so it seems. This is the town from the air (as we departed at 10:00pm), a small city/town/village of 3618 souls, huddled against the Bering Sea, compacted so as to provide mutual warmth in the winter. Oh, and if you've ever wondered, like I sometimes do, where all the US Army Corps of Engineers' money goes, well, Nome has the nicest brand new port facility, jetties and all.


Alaska Airlines flies their trusty cargo/passenger combination 737s out of Anchorage, stopping in both Nome and Kotzebue. These are the short, older, well-worn planes, with the powerful engines and huge thrust reversers that could land this thing on an aircraft carrier. The front half carries cargo (milk, mail, vegetables?) and they squeeze the unfortunates into the back to ride a noisy, cramped 90-minutes.

And who needs that cushy, carpeted ramp to a warm, inviting terminal, when you can have the narrow, slippery stairs that deploy out the back cabin door and dump you onto the tarmac?

Being next to the beach, Nome itself is pretty flat... the hills are inland a few miles. Visible on top of the nearest set of hills and/or mountains is a relic of the cold war, a set of radar antenna, looking a bit like old drive-in movie screens. Large and square, these guys peered over the horizon into Mother Russia's airspace, watching vigilantly for ICBMs or bombers or whatever they had pointed at us. I am sure that the Russians still have a similar array on a similarly desolate hill overlooking the Bering Sea...






But the key to Nome is gold. Actually, the largest nugget of gold ever found, about 155 ounces or just less than 10 pounds, was discovered on September 29th, 1903 near Nome. At one time, just after gold was discovered on the beach (and was, therefore, free game for all... no stakes required), the population of Nome swelled to 40,000. I wish I could have had the corner on the market on tents...

Where gold was the goal, all manner of technology was employed to retrieve it from the earth. Pans, sluices, dredges: they have all left their tell-tale of vast heaps of sand tailings and disrupted tundra. And because transportation is just so expensive when you exist at the end of the world, all the used equipment is just dropped where it lies, to be slowly reclaimed by the environment. Or, sometimes circled by a walkway and designated a city park.

Nome has also gone to the dogs: that last bastion of frontier testosterone known as the Iditarod. The dogsled race starts in Anchorage, runs some 1100 miles across Alaska, much of it still along the original historic dogsled route, to finish on Front Street in the center of Nome.







Then there are the tourists... what were they thinking? Could it be the world's largest gold panning pan?






Or the famous Nugget Inn... which is, I think, the only hotel in town with free wifi. Which reminds me, between Chief Garcia and myself, we had three cellphones, and none of them worked. Yeah, Julie just loved that... Ken can't call out...








The Nugget was full of historical odds and ends. A story tells of how a powerful storm swept thru Nome, flooding everything, including the town cemetery. An old miner returns to his cabin to find a coffin at his door. He opens it to find the body of a famous dancehall queen who passed on a decade before. "Well, Mary," he says to himself, "you're still the best looking woman in town."

We had a great trip to Nome, this metropolis of NW Alaska. We worked some long hours, did some dockside exams, spread the word, and showed the flag. We also got to play a little, and enjoy the gracious hospitality of the folks who call this home.

We also had an interesting expedition of our own... not for gold, but for pictures. Any good adventure has an element of risk and danger. Chief and I had an epic ourselves, a tale to be told soon, where we learned just how big and indifferent Alaska is to the people who come here. But that is another story.

KML