![]() ![]() “We’re going to be the first deep-draft Arctic port but probably not going to be the last,” Nome Mayor John Handeland said. The Bering Strait shipping lanes have gotten only busier since 2009, going from 262 transits that year to 509 in 2022. Nome, founded after gold was discovered in 1898, has seen six of its 10 warmest winters on record just in this century. With the expansion, he’s hoping guests on larger cruise ships will extend their stays to experience more of Nome and the tundra, to view wild musk ox, or to sip a drink at the 123-year-old Board of Trade Saloon.Ĭlimate change is making this all possible. Studies show that cruise ship passengers typically spend about $100 per day in Nome, city manager Glenn Steckman said. She now sells to tourists and locals alike from her own Naataq Gear gift store, a retail spot in the post office building, where about 20 Alaska Native artists offer ivory carvings, beadwork or paintings through consignment. It wasn’t, but the interaction inspired Bioff to create her own line of waterproof jackets styled like kuspuks. One of the guests admired her cloth kuspuk, a traditional Alaska Native garment similar to a smock, and wanted to know if it was water resistant. The expansion will "support our local economy and the local artists here, the Indigenous artists having access to the visitors and teaching and sharing our culture and our language and how we how we make our beautiful art,” said Alice Bioff, an Inupiaq resident of Nome.īioff was a tour guide who greeted the Serenity's passengers when they arrived in 2016. It's a prospect that excites business owners and officials in Nome, but concerns others who worry about the impact of additional tourists and vessel traffic on the environment and animals Alaska Natives depend on for subsistence. The expansion, expected to be operational by the end of the decade, will accommodate not just larger cruise ships of up to 4,000 passengers, but cargo ships to deliver additional goods for the 60 Alaska Native villages in the region, and military vessels to counter the presence of Russian and Chinese ships in the Arctic. That's expected to change as a $600 million-plus expansion makes Nome, population 3,500, the nation's first deep-water Arctic port. While smaller cruise ships are able to dock, officials say that of the dozen arriving this year, half will anchor offshore. The problem remains: There's no place to park the big boats. It was 2016, and at the time, the cruise ship Serenity was the largest vessel ever to sail through the Northwest Passage.īut as the Arctic sea ice relents under the pressures of global warming and opens shipping lanes across the top of the world, more tourists are venturing to Nome - a northwest Alaska destination known better for the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and its 1898 gold rush than luxury travel. Its well-heeled tourists had to shimmy into small boats for another ride to shore. ANCHORAGE, Alaska – The cruise ship with about 1,000 passengers anchored off Nome, too big to squeeze into into the tundra city's tiny port. ![]()
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