Nome Gold Beaches

The Seward Peninsula has been home to Inupiaq people for thousands of years, and it remains so today. Nome is a hub for the region's Inupiat communities, and much of the surrounding land and subsistence tradition is theirs. The gold rush that made the town famous was a brief, loud chapter laid over a much older and still-living human presence on this coast.

The strike that started it came in 1898 at Anvil Creek, a few miles inland, where three prospectors later nicknamed the Three Lucky Swedes, Jafet Lindeberg, Erik Lindblom, and John Brynteson, found rich ground. But the discovery that made Nome legendary came the next summer, when miners realized the beach sand itself was gold-bearing. Because no one could stake a claim on the open beach between the tidelines, the sand was free to all comers.

News reached the outside world and the stampede of 1900 was on. Ships unloaded thousands of hopefuls onto the shore, since there was no harbor, only surf and lighters ferrying people through the waves. At its peak Nome held something like 20,000 people living in a chaos of tents, saloons, and rocker boxes strung for miles along the sand. It was a town with no law to speak of, and its early history is thick with claim-jumping and outright fraud.

The easy beach gold thinned within a few years, and Nome settled into a smaller, hardier life of hard-rock and dredge mining. Fires and Bering Sea storms repeatedly battered the town, yet it endured. Today Nome is a working community of a few thousand, part regional hub, part mining town, and the gold in the sand is still there for anyone willing to work for it.

The gold at Nome began in the rock of the hills inland, in quartz veins laced with fine gold. Over long stretches of geologic time, creeks and glaciers ground that rock down and carried the gold seaward, spreading it through the gravels of the coastal plain and finally into the beach itself.

Because gold is heavy, wave action sorts it. The surf winnows away the lighter sand and concentrates the dense flecks of gold into dark, iron-rich layers you can sometimes see as reddish or black streaks in the beach. Reading those layers is the whole art of beach panning here, and old-timers will tell you the storms that tear up the beach each fall are what refresh the pay streaks for the next summer.

The gold is fine, often called flour gold, rather than the nuggets of prospecting daydreams. Recovering it takes a careful hand with the pan and a willingness to work slowly, letting the water carry off the sand grain by grain until the color settles at the bottom.

Every March, Nome becomes the finish of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, the thousand-mile run from Anchorage across the Alaska Range, the Interior, and the Bering Sea coast. Teams come off the sea ice and up onto Front Street to pass beneath the burled arch, a heavy timber gateway that marks the end of the trail.

The race honors the 1925 serum run, when relays of dog teams carried diphtheria antitoxin to a snowbound Nome to stop an epidemic, a feat that made the lead dogs Balto and Togo household names. The arch stands on Front Street year-round, and even in summer it is the town's most photographed spot, a quiet monument to sled dogs and the people who run them.

Nome is a legendary base for birders, because three gravel roads run out of town into tundra and mountains that draw species found almost nowhere else in North America. Bristle-thighed curlews, bluethroats, and Arctic warblers nest out here, and the roads are among the best places on the continent to find them.

Musk oxen, shaggy survivors of the Ice Age, graze the tundra and are often spotted from the roads, along with reindeer, moose, and grizzly bears. Offshore, the Bering Sea carries walrus, seals, and migrating whales, and the whole coast lies along one of the great flyways for shorebirds and waterfowl moving to and from the Arctic.

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