In January 1925, diphtheria broke out in Nome, and the nearest serum sat 674 miles away in Nenana. Twenty mushers and their dog teams ran it west in relay — 127 hours through interior cold that fell below minus forty. Leonhard Seppala and his lead dog Togo drove the longest and most dangerous leg, roughly 260 miles including a shortcut across the shifting sea ice of Norton Sound; Gunnar Kaasen and Balto brought the serum the final 55 miles into town through an eighty-mile-an-hour blizzard, arriving at 5:30 on the morning of February 2. The epidemic was stopped. The Great Race of Mercy made national heroes of the mushers and both dogs — and Alaskans will tell you Togo’s run was the harder one.
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.
Why People Visit Nome Alaska
Nome combines gold-rush history, sled-dog tradition, Bering Strait geography, and open tundra in a way no other town can. Visitors come for race week in March, for the beach where the last great American gold rush ended, for muskox and wildflowers in the long summer light, for the aurora, and for the plain fact that the road runs out here. Remote, resilient, unforgettable.
