Nome

You don’t pass through Nome on the way to anywhere else — there are no roads connecting it to the rest of Alaska, so you fly in specifically, and that isolation is the first thing that tells you something about the place. I landed on a small jet from Anchorage and stepped out into wind coming straight off the Bering Sea, flat gray water stretching toward Siberia, which is closer to Nome than most of the rest of the United States.

Nome exploded into existence in 1898 when gold was discovered in the beach sand itself, and at its peak the town held some 20,000 people living in a tent city on the Bering Sea shore, a boomtown so improbable it’s hard to picture even standing where it happened. The gold rush architecture along Front Street has mostly given way to practical, weather-beaten modern buildings, but the burled wood arch marking the Iditarod finish line still stands over the street, and being there in March when mushers actually cross it — exhausted, ice-caked, greeted by a town that turns out entirely for the occasion — is one of the more moving pieces of Americana I’ve witnessed anywhere in the state.

Outside town, three gravel roads — to Council, to Teller, and to Kougarok — push out into genuine Arctic tundra, and I drove the Council Road slowly with binoculars on the seat, watching muskoxen graze in loose herds against a landscape with barely a tree in sight, and stopping at abandoned gold dredges rusting quietly in the tundra grass, machines the size of buildings left exactly where they stopped working decades ago. Bird life along these roads in spring is remarkable — this stretch of coast sits on a major migratory flyway, and birders come specifically for species rarely seen elsewhere in North America.

When to go: Mid-March for the Iditarod finish, an experience unlike anything else in Alaska. June for birding and the tundra roads, when the ground is dry enough for driving and the light lasts nearly all night.