Nome was founded in 1898 during the Nome Gold Rush, when thousands flocked to the Bering Sea coast seeking fortune. Long before, the Inupiat people lived there, fishing, hunting, and enduring harsh Arctic conditions. Nome's founding identity reflects both Indigenous survival and frontier ambition, where a gold stampede created sudden prosperity. The settlement grew rapidly into a bustling boomtown of tents, saloons, and miners. Nome's origins highlight Alaska's dual identity: Native continuity and frontier upheaval. Its early story emphasized resilience, ambition, and survival, making it one of Alaska's most famous Gold Rush towns of heritage and endurance.
The finish line of the Iditarod, the end of the last great American gold rush, and the closest US city to Russia. Nome, Alaska sits on the Bering Sea coast of the Seward Peninsula, 539 miles northwest of Anchorage and 161 miles east of Russia across the Bering Strait. Little Diomede, the small American island just offshore, is two and a half miles from Russian Big Diomede — the closest point between the two countries, with the International Date Line running between them. The Iñupiat lived here for centuries before any of what follows. On September 22, 1898, three prospectors — Jafet Lindeberg, Erik Lindblom, and John Brynteson — struck gold on Anvil Creek a few miles up from the beach. By the next summer, gold was being found in the black sand of the beach itself, and tens of thousands of stampeders piled off ships from Seattle. Population briefly hit somewhere north of 10,000, making Nome briefly the largest city in Alaska. Wyatt Earp — the same Wyatt Earp from Tombstone — opened a saloon on Front Street in 1899 and ran it for two years; biographers estimate he made more money in Nome than from all his frontier-lawman exploits combined. In late January 1925, diphtheria broke out in town. The nearest serum was 674 miles away in Nenana. Over 127 hours, twenty mushers ran the serum in relay across Alaska in temperatures below minus forty, with two lead dogs entering popular memory: Togo, who with Leonhard Seppala covered the longest and most dangerous leg across Norton Sound sea ice, and Balto, who with Gunnar Kaasen drove the final stretch into Nome through an eighty-mile-an-hour blizzard. The serum arrived at five-thirty in the morning on February 2. The epidemic was averted. Forty-eight years later, in March 1973, the first Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race finished on the same Front Street, under what would soon become the Burled Arch — the iconic spruce-and-cottonwood arch the town has reinstalled every March since 1975. Every year since, the world's premier long-distance sled-dog teams have run roughly a thousand miles from Anchorage to this same wooden arch, and every March the town of three thousand five hundred people doubles. The aurora rolls overhead for half the year. There's no place like Nome.
Why People Visit Nome Alaska
- Stand at the Burled Arch on Front Street, the iconic finish line of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race since 1975, where every musher finishes the thousand-mile run from Anchorage.
- Visit the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum, holding artifacts from 1898 Anvil Creek gold rush, the 1925 Serum Run, and Iñupiat cultural collections from the Seward Peninsula.
- Drive Cape Nome Road and the Nome-Council Highway, one of three gravel roads that connect Nome to the surrounding peninsula — wide tundra views, seabirds, summer wildflowers, and muskox sightings.
- See the abandoned gold dredges scattered across the tundra outside town, massive industrial relics from 1920s-30s deep dredging operations.
- Visit Anvil Creek, the original 1898 gold discovery site a few miles north of town.
- See the White Alice towers on Anvil Mountain, four enormous tropospheric-scatter antennas from the Cold War US Air Force communications system in operation 1957-1979, accidentally photogenic against the Arctic sky.
- Walk Front Street and the Snake River mouth at the breakwater, where driftwood, salt air, and the working harbor meet the Bering Sea.
- Stop at St. Joseph's Catholic Church, completed in 1901 — one of the few structures to survive the 1934 city fire.
- Observe the aurora borealis from September through March on clear nights — Nome's long subarctic winter darkness makes it one of the best aurora-viewing locations in Alaska.
