Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum

In 1898, three prospectors known as the Lucky Swedes struck gold in the creeks near what became Nome, and word soon spread that the very beach sands held gold as well. That was the spark. By 1900, a tent-and-shack city had erupted along the shore, and Nome briefly became one of the largest towns in Alaska.

The beach gold was unusual: because it lay in public sand, anyone with a shovel and a rocker box could work a claim of open beach, drawing a democratic, desperate crowd of thousands. Storms, disease, cold, and lawlessness made life brutal, and fortunes were made and lost in a season.

The museum's collection of gold-rush photographs, taken by photographers who documented the boom, is among its treasures, showing the crowded beaches, the ramshackle streets, and the faces of the people who chased the gold to the end of the map.

In the winter of 1925, a deadly diphtheria outbreak threatened Nome, and the only serum was hundreds of miles away with no way to fly it in through the Arctic winter. The solution was a relay of dog teams that carried the lifesaving antitoxin across the frozen Interior in a desperate race against time and blizzard.

Some twenty mushers and their teams passed the serum hand to hand through brutal cold. The final legs are the most remembered, with the musher Gunnar Kaasen and his lead dog Balto arriving in Nome, while Leonhard Seppala and his dog Togo covered the longest and most dangerous stretch. The run captured the world's attention and saved the town.

That story is the root of the modern Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, which runs each March from the Anchorage area to Nome, finishing under the burled arch on Front Street. The museum keeps the serum-run history and the mushing tradition alive.

Long before gold, and continuing today, the Seward Peninsula and Bering Strait coast are Inupiat homeland. The Inupiat have lived here for thousands of years, hunting marine mammals, fishing, and gathering, and sustaining a rich culture of skin sewing, ivory carving, drumming, and dance.

The museum's exhibits on Inupiat life help set the gold rush in perspective, as a brief and disruptive episode in a much longer human story on this coast. The region's villages remain Inupiat communities where subsistence and tradition continue.

Nome itself is a hub for those villages, and Native art, especially ivory and baleen work, is part of the town's life. Buying directly from Inupiat artists supports the makers and their communities.

Nome remains a small, weathered town off the road system, reached by air and facing the Bering Sea. Front Street runs along the water, and the beach where the gold rush began is still open to recreational miners who work the sands in summer.

The town comes most alive in March, when the Iditarod finish brings crowds and celebration, and again in the long-daylight summer, when a few gravel roads out of town offer some of the most accessible tundra and wildlife viewing in western Alaska. The museum is the best place to understand how this improbable town on the edge of the sea came to be.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.