Bering Sea Gold
I arrived in Nome the day before Alex Haley's departure, leaving me about eight hours to see this town known in B-movies as the military's end-of-career station for misbehaving officers. Nome is not the bleak Quonset hut in a frontier blizzard it once was. It is charming, the end of the Iditarod sled-dog race, and currently the stage for the popular Discovery Channel (un)reality show, Bering Sea Gold. In August, residents tend small patches of grass and colorful potted pansies that are often cultivated in the enormous steel buckets of abandoned gold dredges. Picture a 40- or 50-foot-long chainsaw, each tooth being a bucket pulling the seabed upward and into the barge. Seth Burnenschenkels works Norman Todd Haig's diminutive gold-dredge boat called Aurora Marie. He was dockside when I walked to the port because the suction dredge was down. Yet in his sluice was evidence of gold dust mined the day before, and he was preparing a wet vac to slurp the color from the ribbed matting. It was far less than an ounce but a more realistic, and still rarer, harvest than that often seen on the highly produced show. Haig pointed to a large commercial dredge on the Nome jetty. “That guy gets most of the gold you see up here,” he said. In truth, geologists believe there is still much gold on the shallow sea plain, but the sea bottom has been tossed and tumbled by dredges for over 100 years. Storms stir it and make bits of gold more reachable. Now that the price is $1,200 an ounce, there is enough profit in recovering small amounts of it to attract miners who often hand-build dredge barges and cobble together equipment to raise it. Nome abounds with wildlife, including musk ox, brown bear, reindeer, arctic fox and more. Musk ox are a problem on the Nome airport runway and, the local paper reports, have killed several dogs in town. The entire town is a monument to three things: the historic Iditarod sled-dog race, gold mining and the Eskimo founders. The town square features bronze statues of the Swedish miners who discovered gold in Alaska, and the noteworthy explorers and Eskimo families who were the First Nation occupants of the Seward Sound area. I wish I had been allowed more time to explore it.