The Iñupiat were here first, and they are here still. The coast around Sitŋasuaq — the Iñupiaq name for the Nome area — had been fished and hunted for centuries before any prospector arrived, part of a network of Seward Peninsula communities living by salmon, seal, walrus, and caribou. Roughly half of Nome’s people today are Alaska Native, and the town remains a hub for the surrounding Iñupiat villages of the region. Whatever gold built here, the deeper story of this coast is continuity — a homeland that long predates the stampede and outlasts it.
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.
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.
