Moving along. I spent the next few days making my way back to MIA via CUN to re-connect with my DONE4 and on to ANC xDFW, then a separate AS flight to Nome (OME). Although AA flies direct HAV-MIA, it is not possible to travel directly to LOTFAP if you have been in Cuba for tourism.
I arrived in Nome a few days ahead of the start of my Arctic Ocean voyage that began with a charter flight from OME to Anadyr (DYR) in Russia. I wanted to check out this very isolated and famous gold-rush town and surrounding area. While the weather was not brutally unkind, it was characterised by low and heavy cloud most of the time.
HAV gets an eclectic mix of birds, and hauling out.
Coming into ANC.
Hauling out of ANC to OME.
Coming into OME. That’s an old mining dredge (more on those later) on the left, and the very spartan and small AS terminal.
Nome (
Nome, Alaska - Wikipedia) is very much a frontier town. It’s very isolated and there are no roads connecting Nome with the rest of Alaska. There are only three roads, radiating little more than 120 km each E, N and NW from Nome.
On 18 July, there was still no official night, just a few hours of civil twilight.
It’s famous for the annual Iditarod dog-sled race (
Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race - Wikipedia) from Anchorage, a distance of more than 1500 km, and taking about nine days.
The Nome gold deposits are alluvial and the initial discovery was made on the beach. The rush that followed had sluice-boxers densely packed on the beach and even today some fossickers still run little sluice-boxes on the beach.
Then followed the era of large land-based dredges that crawled along in artificial ponds, digging out the soil on bucket-lines, sluicing it for the gold and then back-filling behind them the spoil. There are many of these abandoned throughout the region.
All, or most, of the mining today is carried out by ocean-going dredges that work in the large shallow bay.