We’re setting off for 4 week adventure: my son Mark, brother Tom, and me. We’re excited to travel with Tom! It’s his first expedition adventure. Tom’s wife Mary, like Greg, chose to sit this one out.
Aug 20 Tuesday - long travel day. Up at 3:30 AM (12:30 AM at our destination) to fly from Philly to Vancouver via Los Angeles. Met up with Tom at our city hotel. Ran a couple of small shopping errands. Shared a great dinner at a Nepalese restaurant Mark (our designated gourmand) found. We’re all excited about getting on the ship tomorrow in Nome!
Aug 21 Wednesday - met in the hotel lobby at 5 AM for transfer to Vancouver airport and our charter flight to Nome, Alaska. First leg to Anchorage was lovely, with fine views of gaping volcanic craters, snow-capped mountain ranges and glaciers trailing to the sea.
After a quick crew change in Anchorage, we continued on to Nome. We landed in the remnants of Typhoon Ampil, which was battering Nome and moving into the Bering Strait.
Native people have lived here for thousands of years. They migrated over the (now submerged) Bering Land Bridge from northeastern Russia around 16,500 years ago and gradually spread across and down the Americas to the southern tip of South America.
The United States purchased Alaska from Russia (who’d established a sizable fur trading industry along Alaska’s southern coast) in 1867. After miners discovered gold on the Nome beach in 1899, the town exploded to over 30,000 residents with all the rough edges one expects to find in a gold rush town. A few years later the boom ended, and the town shrunk dramatically.
Today, Nome is a hardscrabble town of 3,500 people. It has a road system consisting of mostly unpaved gravel and potholed roads in town, with three 60-70 mile spurs stretching out to 3 distant villages. Access to the rest of the state is by air or sea. Like Juneau, no roads connect Nome to other parts of the state.
Tom headed to the ship on the first bus transfer from the airport, while Mark and I, on the third, were diverted to a small community building used for Iditarod activities. The idea was to not overload the check-in desk, but it turned into an 8 hour diversion as the weather got too rough to safely board the ship.
The windchill was in the mid-twenties with gusts around 50 mph. Mark was more adventurous than I and explored the town on foot. We also had the option to take little shuttles around town.
Ubiquitous metal buckets, sometimes whimsically repurposed as planters, were originally used in gold dredging.
The Foster Building houses a small museum, the town library, and a temporary desk manned by the NPS for the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve headquarters. I got an NPS passport stamp! The regular headquarters is being renovated here in town. The National Preserve itself is over a hundred miles away, accessible by bush planes, boat, or snowmobile.
The Foster building also houses a gorgeous 1900 NCR cash register from Dayton, Ohio. It was originally in a saloon here, but is now the museum’s working cash register.
Mark found this sculpture commemorating Roald Amundsen.
One of my shuttle drivers is a biology professor at the small Nome university branch. She studies the resident population of around 300 musk oxen. Hundreds of small ponds, remnants of tracer mines, have gradually filled in with horsetail, a plant loved by the muskox. She was surprised we didn’t see any, but said they were likely hunkered down in the wind.
Tom texted that the ship announced that about 80 people were at a “very comfortable hotel” while we waited to board. They did bring us pizza, beer and soda.
We finally boarded around 8 pm. It was touch and go as they tried to stabilize the gangway while the ship slid forward and back and waves crashed over the walkway. Crew members physically escorted us each onto the ship, timing it between the waves. Good to be aboard. Let the adventure begin!
No comments:
Post a Comment