Nome

Just 165 mi from the coast of Siberia, Nome is considerably closer to Russia than to either Anchorage or Fairbanks. And though you'll find 300 mi of local road system well worth exploring, to get to Nome you must either fly or mush a team of sled dogs.

For centuries before Nome gained fame as a gold-rush town, nomadic Inupiat Eskimos seasonally inhabited the area in hunting and fishing camps. The gold stampede occurred in the 1890s and was over relatively fast, even though gold is still mined by both prospectors and open-pit mining productions.

What keeps Nome on the popularity map, however, is the Iditarod Trail. Even though parts of the historic trail from Nome to Anchorage were initially used as routes for the Native Eskimos and Athabascans, the full trail gained fame in 1925, when Nome was hit with an outbreak of diphtheria. There was no remedy in town. The serum was ferried by the Alaska Railroad to Nenana 250 mi from Anchorage. Then a 20-dog sled team ran it the remaining 674 mi in -50 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures in five days and seven hours; Nome was saved. In 1973, in honor of the original Iditarod (a word derived from the Athabascan word haiditarod, meaning "a far, distant place"), an annual race for dog mushers was started. The race begins in Anchorage and traverses snow and tundra for 1,150 mi to Nome. It is said the race is 1,049 mi, however, to commemorate Alaska's being the 49th state. Thousands of people converge in Nome to watch the dog mushers come over the finish line in March. Still thousands more visitors come to Nome in the summer months to take advantage of the beautiful effulgent colors of wildflowers and green grass, its wildlife viewing and birding.

Though at first sight there doesn't seem to be much to see of the flat tundra town, there are many relics of the past in and around the area. There are 44 abandoned gold dredges, enormous constructions of steel, scattered all over the town. (Can you find all of them?) Just east of town on the road out to Council, a quiet summer fishing village inhabited by many locals during the summer, you'll stumble across not only fantastic marshlands for birding, but also the Last Train to Nowhere quietly rusting away. In the opposite direction, northeast of Nome on the road to Taylor you'll come to the Pilgrim Hot Springs, the site of an old settlement including the former Our Lady of Lourdes chapel and orphanage for Eskimo children during the 1918 influenza epidemic. And directly north of Nome is the beautiful native village of Teller, a subsistence village in Grantley Harbor.

The roads to these destinations are unpaved but traversable. From the road you are sure to see herds of reindeer, musk oxen, grizzly bears, and moose, and a slew of different birds like the long-tailed jaegers, yellow wagtails, and the rarely seen in North America bristle-thighed curlew.