Unlike other commercial hubs in rural Alaska, Nome is a “wet” city, with bars and liquor stores. Nome has many of them for the three-fourths of the Alaska Native population that has an alcohol problem, which greatly concerns Pastors David and Julie. At this bar, the sign below the word “Saloon” says, “Headquarters for the Sin City of Nome.”

One of Nome's Many Bars

Pastor Julie’s and David’s Methodist Church is Nome’s oldest Protestant Church, established 1900.

Nome's Methodist Church

[Read more →]

“A taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no housekeeper.”

- Henry David Thoreau

Today on my third day in Nome I explored the third and last road leading out of the town. The Kougarok Road took me 85 miles one-way into the interior. The road ends at the Kougarok River Bridge.

If a town of Kougarok ever existed, it has no buildings now. In fact, the only houses along the entire road are warming huts. No one lives anywhere along the Kougarok Road.

But I saw lots of beautiful tundra and clear lakes and streams as well as these mountains.

The Valley of the Pilgrim River

Pilgrim River and Mount Osborn

Sailboat on Salmon Lake

Now I’m back in Nome for a few hours before flying tonight to Anchorage. “Visiting the Nome area is a trip of a lifetime,” John says. It sure is.

This morning I was on the road to Safety Sound before the sun was up. Safety Sound is a bay on the Bering Sea about 20 miles south of Nome, where I am staying for a few days in the Community United Methodist Church.

I got going so early because I hoped to see bears. In the event I did track a bear on the beach sand near Safety Sound. But I didn’t see any bears. Even better, no bears saw me.

I tracked the bear’s prints. At lunch at the Senior Center with Pastors Julie and David Elmore I asked people if this was a grizzly, and they said that it was and it was probably running. Away from me.

Tracking a Grizzly

[Read more →]

Here they call the road from Nome to Teller a highway. By Alaska standards it may be one, but not by mine.

Only the first mile of the 72 mile road is paved. The rest of the road is gravel with thousands of potholes.

Still, Nome is unique in the Alaska bush in having roads leading out of it. While Nome’s only connections to the outside world are by airplane or ship, three roads go to nearby villages from Nome, including the “Teller Highway,” which I took this afternoon in the Methodist church’s van that Julie and David Elmore loaned me.

En Route to Teller in the Methodist Church's Van

[Read more →]

A few days ago when John mentiond that he knew a Methodist missionary couple in Nome, I said that I wanted to visit them. Today he set up the trip.

Since he needed to deal with some pressing issues at his church in Anchorage, I flew without him to Nome. This morning John suggested that I make the reservations in hopes that later in the day he could reach the pastors in Nome, Julie and David Elmore. He did contact them today, and they immediately said that they could put me up on an air mattress in the church and loan me a car. Because of the death of one of their congregation, they already had a lot on their plate, but they gave me a great welcome.

John asked me to write up and photograph what Julie and David are doing because John’s congregation provides some of the support for the Nome church. He also got his church to pay about half of my plane ticket on Alaska Airlines from Anchorage to Nome.

Eskimo Family Leaving Anchorage for Nome

Booking a flight at the last moment didn’t give me the choice of a non-stop flight. Instead, I flew through Kotzebue. And that was just fine with me, because Kotzebue is even further north than Nome. In fact, it’s north of the Arctic Circle and is the second largest Eskimo village. [Read more →]

John and I left Talkeetna today to fly around Denali National Park and to even land on a glacier there. We took a little one-engine De Havilland DHC-3 Otter aircraft with a pilot and seven other passengers. All of us had window seats offering incredible views, and I even had the co-pilot’s seat for half of the trip.

Before we got so high where we saw nothing but snow, ice, rock, and mountains, the tundra was already showing its fall colors.

Fall in Denali National Park

[Read more →]

John and I made a 120 mile drive yesterday from his condo in Anchorage to Talkeetna, a base station for visits to Denali National Park. En route we made three fascinating stops.

In the northern outskirts of Anchorage we visited the Alaska Native Heritage Center where we saw how the 11 native peoples lived and what they made and how they danced. Here is the totem pool at the center.

Totem Poll

[Read more →]

About lunch time today I looked out the kitchen window of John’s condo. Just across the road I saw a mother moose and her two calves feeding on the neighbor’s trees. Of course, I went right out to shoot them.

Neighboring Moose

I am beginning to understand why people here in Anchorage aren’t as fond of moose as I am. Except for dinner. John cooked moose steaks for us last night. Delicious and low fat.

John and I went back to Whittier, Alaska. A friend of his invited us to spend last night at her “Sound View Bed and Breakfast.” Until we got to our room I didn’t understand “sound view.”

After all, we hear sounds, but don’t view them. Except in this case. Our room had a great view of Price William Sound in the Gulf of Alaska.

Whittier is a funky little town and port. Except by sea and a one-lane 2.5 mile combined rail-highway tunnel (the longest such in North America) that’s open only once an hour, Whittier is cut off from the rest of the world. Just 181 people lived there at the latest census, but thousands come through on the ferry from Washington and cruises.

We went there for a cruise to view some of the many glaciers in the sound. This is the largest concentration of tidewater glaciers in Alaska.

The rain got harder the longer we were in Whittier. We weren’t surprised because this tiny town in the rainforest gets almost 200 inches of rain per year.

Then the sea got so rough that we noticed whitecaps. Finally, shortly before the cruise ship was scheduled to leave at 1:30 this afternoon, they cancelled on us.

No problem. In fact, two wrongs in this case make a right. The cruise that we really wanted to go on was full this morning. We will come back for it.

Meanwhile, we picked up another one of the prospective cruise ship passengers, a woman from Houston named Lisa. She had come down on the train after leaving her rental car in Anchorage. After a good lunch in the only classy restaurant in Whittier, the three of us drove back to Anchorage.

But first we stopped at the wonderful Potter Marsh at the southern end of the Anchorage Coastal Wildlife Refuge. We walked the 1,550-foot boardwalk, which provides access to the northern part of the marsh. Here I spotted a great example of what Alaskans calls the fireweed flower — quite different from Colorado’s fireweed.

Alaska's Fireweed

[Read more →]

Yesterday’s rain cleared the atmosphere in Anchorage so much today that we had a rare view of Denali. At 20,320 feet, Denali or Mount McKinley is the highest mountain in North America. It is 158 miles from Anchorage.

John heard from a friend that we could get a great view of the mountain from a hilltop park at the edge of the city. So we dropped our other plans and drove right there, getting this special view:

Denali After the Rain

[Read more →]