Our Nome logo carries Alaska’s distressed bear over “1959,” the year of statehood — the shared retro emblem of every Merlin Classics Alaska town. Printed in worn black-and-white that recalls a crate stamp or an outfitter’s mark, the bear is the state in shorthand: rugged, patient, at home in hard country. What makes this one Nome is everything around it — the beach that paid in gold, the dog teams, the Bering Sea at the door, and Siberia over the horizon.
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.
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.
