Nome Arrival

Saturday, September 5, 2015
Nome, Alaska
64°30.0'N 165°25.2'W

We arrived at Nome, Alaska around midnight last night after a gentle, fast day of sailing down from the Bering Strait. This morning we tied up in the small boat harbour, the only sailboat, on a dock lined with gold dredgers. After twenty-five days aboard to get here, we're enjoying some time in 'quiet' mode where the world stops moving for a while. It won't last for long though as we plan to get underway again on Monday for the last leg of this journey. We have a busy day tomorrow refueling and reprovisioning etc. It was a drizzly day here today, but, the temperature was 55°F and that felt like quite a treat.

Every boat in the small boat harbour is aluminum, Gjoa fits right in.

For those of you who don't know Nome, it was founded as a gold rush town around 1901. There is still gold mining going on here today. It's mostly small scale with individuals, or, small companies, working dredges along the shorelines in town. The people working the dredges are of the northern 'type': fiercely independent, stubborn, hard-working, dreamers who've come together at a frontier looking for the good life. Some find it, most don't, just like in 1901.

In our continuing series of Norwegian links and coincidences there are also many Roald Amundsen links with Nome. There is a bust of Amundsen here on Front St. with an identical one installed at Ny Alesund, Spitsbergen, Norway. We saw the bust at Ny Alesund while there in 2011 and now we have seen its twin here in Nome. The busts were installed to commemorate Amundsen's airship flight over the North Pole in 1926. The flight started in Ny Alesund and ended at Teller, Alaska, a community close to Nome. Nome is also the place where Amundsen's 'Maud' was seized by bailiffs, prior to being sold.

Roald Amundsen

The town's name is a tourism marketer's dream come true. Some of the cheesy phrases encountered so far are:

Nome, sweet Nome
What's in a Nome
Nome at Last
There's no place like Nome

I'm sure there must be others, have a go...

Another claim to fame for Nome, is that it is the end of the Iditarod sled dog race which runs from Anchorage to Nome and follows a historic trail route once used as an overland winter supply route.

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