sonora2sonoma

To say the only means of reaching Nome were by air or sea ignores the means of transportation by which the place became legendary. In Winter-time, when the rivers and creeks, and even the ocean, are hard frozen, travel by boat is impossible: Prior to the invention of the snowmobile, the dogsled provided an ingenuous work-around.

Gold-seekers travelling the historic Iditarod Trail by dog team made their way to the gold fields of White Mountain and Nome in the early 1920s. Trappers likely used the trail before them and the indigenous peoples long before the trappers.

The inspiration for the famed Iditarod dogsled race was the use of the trail in 1925 to mount an emergency effort to deliver medicine to Nome in the midst of a diphtheria outbreak.

Fast-forward four decades to 1967 and the first organized race along a portion of the Iditarod Trail took place, organized by Tribal groups to celebrate Alaska’s Centennial Year. A similar race was held in 1969, leading to the official beginning of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in 1973. The race’s length grew over the years and now runs the entire 1,610 km from Anchorage to Nome.

The race was a source of pride to the residents of Nome and many of those who completed it were held in high regard by the locals. My host, Dave, took pride in his involvement working check points along the race’s course over the years.

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Much has been made of the idea of a Bering land bridge—the theory purported by thinkers and theorists for the past 400 years that a strip of land existed during the last ice age that connected Siberia with the extreme western tip of Alaska. This bridge, it is believed, provided people of that time the means to cross between continents and populate the Americas.

As I mentioned earlier, I watched the ocean freeze over during my stay in Nome in the fall of 1981. Usually, while the ocean is freezing up, my hosts informed me, the freezing takes place in the midst of stormy periods that upset the ice and render it a jumbled mess as it re-forms and thickens. A few years after my first visit to Nome, a former San Francisco supervisor’s son actually walked to Russia over the ice one winter, sparking an international diplomatic incident.

I heard stories, however, of one year back in the 1920s, when no storms disturbed the ice and it froze over smooth, allowing a person driving a Model T to motor across to the Russian side.

Prior to the Russian revolution, Yupik families with kin on the Siberian side of the straight, and vice-versa, would cross by boat in the Summertime to visit each other. This practice was virtually halted during the Soviet era.

So, while the land-bridge theory appears to hold water (no pun intended), based on data from multiple disciplines, and may well have been the impetus for the succeeding waves of immigrants now believed to have made the crossing, it is possible others could have continued to do so by venturing over the ice once the seas swallowed the land as the climate warmed.

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Dave and his wife Terry bent over backwards to show me a good time while I was in their world. On the second or third night I was there, Terry came in from the yard in a state of excitement, telling me to grab my camera and follow her outside. Doing as instructed, I followed her out to the yard, where she pointed upward and said “Look! The Northern Lights!” As I peered at the sky my eyes were greeted by a shimmering greenish, curtain-shaped undulating form spread immodestly across a part of the expanse before me.

I set up a tripod and took a few shots, commenting on the cold as I did so. Terry, heeding my discomfort, and perhaps her own as well, said, “We might as well go in and get warm. You’ll see many more such displays, some even better, while you’re here.”

In the entirety of my stay there—almost seven weeks in all—whether it was due to the frequent cloud-cover or the constant cold, the Northern Lights failed to come back out to play.

Tim Konrad

(To be continued . . )