Today Nome is a town of about 3,700 with no road to the rest of Alaska — you fly in or you sail. Gold dredges rust on the tundra, beach permits still let visitors pan the sand, muskox graze the peninsula, and the aurora rolls overhead from September into March. And the next chapter is underway: the Port of Nome is being expanded into the first deep-draft Arctic port in the United States, a gateway to the opening Arctic. Its story runs from the Iñupiat homeland through the last great gold rush, the Serum Run, and the race that still finishes here. Wear it for where you’re from, where you explored, or where you’re still headed. There’s no place like Nome.
Gold was discovered on Anvil Creek near Nome on September 22, 1898, by Jafet Lindeberg, Erik Lindblom, and John Brynteson — the “Three Lucky Swedes.”
Why People Visit Nome Alaska
- Walk Front Street, where the annual thousand-mile sled dog race from Anchorage has finished under a burled wooden arch since 1973 — a brand-new arch went up for 2025, and race week in March is the town’s biggest event of the year.
- Visit the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum for collections from the 1898 Anvil Creek gold rush, the 1925 Serum Run, and the Iñupiat communities of the Seward Peninsula.
- Drive the three gravel highways — Nome-Council, Kougarok, and Nome-Teller — for wide tundra views, seabirds, summer wildflowers, and muskox sightings before the roads simply end.
- See the abandoned gold dredges standing on the tundra outside town, massive relics of the 1920s–30s deep-dredging era.
- Visit Anvil Creek, the September 1898 discovery site a few miles north of town.
- Look up at the four White Alice antennas on Anvil Mountain, the Cold War communications site in service until 1979, accidentally photogenic against the Arctic sky.
- Stop at St. Joseph’s Church, completed in 1901 — one of the few structures to survive the town’s early disasters.
- Try recreational beach gold panning in summer — the same sands that started it all still give up color, and visitor panning is permitted on the public beach.
- Watch for the aurora borealis on clear nights from September through March — Nome’s long winter darkness makes it one of Alaska’s best northern-lights towns.
