Life Is a Highway

Rascal Flatts

Whooo umm yeah...
Life's like a road that you travel on
When there's one day here and the next day gone
Sometimes you bend, sometimes you stand
Sometimes you turn your back to the wind
There's a world outside ev'ry darkened door
Where blues won't haunt you anymore
Where brave are free and lovers soar
Come ride with me to the distant shore
We won't hesitate
To break down the garden gate
There's not much time left today

Life is a highway
I wanna ride it all night long
If you're going my way
I wanna drive it all night long

ABANDONED GOLD DREDGE, NOME, ALASKA

June 14:  Today was a new adventure.  We traversed the Council Road, straddling the narrow band of sand between the Bering Sea and Safety Sound for the first 30 miles and then began a gradual ascent into the highest areas on the Seward Peninsula.  We climbed steadily along rushing mountain streams, where the clarity of the snowmelt water was crystalline.  What was not so pure was the land, which for 100 years  has been ripped apart, shredded and redeposited in unregulated fashion by the gold dredging and mining operations of the past and the present.  Nome’s entire economy, it seems is and was based entirely on gold mining.  In the past, 161 different dredges were imported and floated into every stream on the Seward Peninsula, slowly working their way inland.  Dredges operate by loading huge iron buckets of gravel from stream beds, running the gravel through filters to remove the minute particles of gold ore, and then dumping the remaining 99.9999% of the gravel back along the stream bed in its wake.  A dredge literally consumes a water course and then defecates what’s left out its rear, leaving wrecked stream beds and piles of debris everywhere they are deployed.  Now the dredges sit idle, no longer used, falling apart where they last operated.  In fact, that’s  pretty much true for everything in Nome.  All machinery, mining equipment, vehicles, snowmobiles, large appliances, building materials and anything large you can think of has been shipped to Nome over the past 100 years.  You know the saying, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”.  Well, in Nome it’s whatever comes to Nome, stays in Nome.  NOTHING ever leaves Nome that was shipped in.  It’s too expensive and difficult.  So everywhere you look sit rusting hulks of all mining equipment, all vehicle and heavy equipment ever brought here, all large machinery, all boats, snow machines, ATVs, abandoned buildings and anything else that goes into supporting a community.  The entire place often looks like an open dump for all this industrial and consumer garbage. Not attractive, to say the least.  On the other hand, there some areas of this town of almost 4,000 people that are nicer, with well maintained residences and businesses.  But not many.

Nonetheless, the streams now run clear, even if not in their original channels, and we continued upward into the bare mountains, surrounded by tundra and bouquets of tiny wildflowers that adorn it.  On a high cliff, a small perched speck turned out to be a gyrfalcon.  Just as we neared the highest point of our drive, a huge muskox bull placidly grazed in a nearby meadow, his rich and lengthy fur coat draped elegantly down his sides.  Or, depending on your world view, you could say he looked like a large dust mop with horns.

ALPINE AZALEA

OUR IRON HORSE

We picnicked at the Skookum Pass, the highest point of our drive, watching northern wheatears flash among the rocks, an unexpected snow bunting in bright white and black plumage and American pipits fly over.  The descent on the other side of the mountain eventually brought us almost back to sea level at the native village of Council, which is only accessible by boating across a river.  From the opposite shore, the buildings looked fresh and the village seemed neat and clean, just the way they wanted it without tourists like us poking around.  This was completely opposite from our experience in the native Teller village yesterday, where, even more so than Nome, everything was a wreck.

MOOSE

We made our way back over the mountains and stopped for some liquid refreshment at the Safety Roadhouse, a funky old establishment that not only features every wall covered with dollar bills that patrons have posted, but a makeshift driving range where you can hit balls off a mat and try to land them in large tires a hundred yards out.  

Dinner was frozen lasagna back at the Inn and then lights out.

June 15:  A slow start today as heavy fog enveloped the entire town.  We decided to stick to the beach today, driving along the coast and then to Safety Sound.  Birds do funny things in the north on their breeding grounds, behavior we would never see in migration or where they overwinter.  Gulls sit atop trees.  Snipe adorn the tops of house and telephone poles.  Jaegers sit on traffic signs.  Eagles walk around on the ground.  And the weirdest one was a semipalmated sandpiper perched on a telephone wire and SINGING!  

SPECTACLED EIDER

As we approached Cape Nome, where the serpentine road hugs the coastline like a tight glove, the fog made birding difficult.  We came around the point and there at a small beach sat five emperor geese!  These rare birds for North America breed at very remote inaccessible locations in Alaska, so finding them here was a treat.  But wait, there’s more!  Later in the afternoon, Gale, Shirley and I took the walking tour of historic Nome.  Doug went down to the harbor to check for birds.  The walk was not terribly interesting, since most of the featured buildings no longer housed what they were famous for and were privately owned.  Most were also falling down.  My phone rang, or really, quacked, since that’s what my phone does. Doug said, “I’ve got a spectacled eider in the harbor!  Come right now.”  We ran out of the gift shop we were in and headed for the harbor.  Floating around out in the middle was this amazing looking duck with a black belly, white sides, a green nape and forehead, wearing giant white goggles neatly framed in black, topped off by a bright orange beak.  Spectacled eider was spectacular!  To celebrate, we marched to the Polaris Bar and consumed an inordinate amount of inebriants, followed by dinner at our favorite Chinese/Japanese/Korean/American restaurant, Twin Dragon.  Since the evening was still young, we visited the outdoor Gold Mining Museum, which featured a lot of old rusting gold mining equipment.  There were some interpretive signs explaining the history of mining here, but it would have been very helpful if the large machines were labeled as to their nature and function.  Those were some very tough, and not so tough people who came to Nome around 1900, seeking their fortune.  The most famous was none the less than Wyatt Earp and his wife, who bought a saloon, spent about a year here and left with about $30,000, quite a sum in those days.  In his words, they “mined the miners”, much easier than digging for shiny stuff.

BLUETHROAT

June 16:  Today was nothing short of extraordinary!  I went out early, wandering through the willow thickets and tundra areas behind our Inn, to see what I could scare up.  For the first time in Nome, the sky was clear and sunny.  The day was bright and balmy.   I was consumed by mosquitos.  Apparently they were enjoying the conditions as well.  I believe my eyes and fingertips were the only fleshy areas of my body accessible to the blood-sucking monsters, but they succeeded in draining away about a pint of my bodily fluids before I ran for cover.

Our target for the day was finding the elusive bluethroat, a small, skulking, secretive, non-singing fly-catching thrush that migrates to western Alaska from Siberia each year to taunt birders.  But we figured it out!  No bluethroats were being seen at all the traditional areas, which were low brushy ravines, usually along creeks.  While we were out thrashing the bushes unsuccessfully in search of this speck of colorful feathers, I spoke with another birder who said he had seen one up in the high pass where we had seen bristle-thighed curlew several days ago.  I knew that this winter had been very mild in Nome, with so little snow that they could barely run the Iditarod race.  Bluethroats like scrubby short willows, not the tall ones where we had been looking.  So I figured that because of the light winter, the willows had become overgrown and unsuitable for bluethroat habitat.  So I suggested we move to higher ground and look for the type of habitat they prefer.  After a couple of miles, the road climbed about 200 feet in elevation and the willows were much shorter, interspersed with dry tundra patches.  We walked across the dry tundra tussocks about 100 yards in and started looking.  Within moments, a male bluethroat teed up, sporting its wild bright blue throat with an orange circle in the middle, underscored by a black line, a white line and a wide band of orange across its chest!  V-I-C-T-O-R-Y!

We returned to the seacoast, traveling along Council Road to Safety Sound.  Once again, we struck pay dirt when a tiny alcid, the crested auklet, appeared quite a ways out on the very calm sea, appearing like a single poppy seed on a large slice of bread.  We watched and waited as this 10” black ball of fluff with a bright orange beak and a feather duster protruding from its forehead slowly swam toward shore and us.  It eventually almost came up on the beach below us before once again retreating to the open sea.  It was like it wanted to give us a better look!  This is a species ordinarily only found on offshore islands, breeding primarily on St. Paul Island in the Pribilofs, so we were quite fortunate to find it.

COMMON/ARCTIC LOON?

The rest of the day was spent riding along the Safety Sound road.  We saw a mysterious bird that was either a Pacific loon or an arctic loon.  Watching it and taking photos for quite a while, we still couldn’t tell what it was, since it was in some sort of off-season plumage.  It was quite entertaining, however, as it dove for fish in the shallow bay, giving a sharp yodel as it dove and then slamming into the water like it was doing a bellywhopper.  Not very elegant or loonlike, I fear.  Later we determined that it was indeed an arctic loon, based primarily on the large size of its bill.

That was pretty much it for the trip, except for one more visit to the Polaris Bar in downtown Nome for a celebratory libation.  I have discovered Chelada, a Budweiser concoction made of Bud lite, tomato and clam juice.  I am hooked like a halibut!

DOUG BIRDING WITH THE BLOODSUCKERS

June 17:  Out early, Doug and I walked the tundra and willow thickets behind out Inn.  The mosquitos really appreciated our efforts, especially enjoying Doug.  I had bathed in repellent, which actually worked.  Then the rain started to fall and it was time to leave for the airport for our return flight to Anchorage.