Seward Peninsula Map

The Seward Peninsula is Alaska’s reach toward Asia, a block of tundra, bald mountains and lagoon-lined coast some two hundred miles long, pointing west into the Bering Strait. At its tip, Cape Prince of Wales lies barely fifty miles from Siberia. Kotzebue Sound bites into its northern side, the Arctic Circle runs along its northern edge, and Norton Bay and the Bering Sea wash its southern shore. Nome, the largest town, sits on that southern coast, and the three gravel roads painted here in red run out from it to Teller, to Council and into the Kougarok country, and then stop. No road connects Nome to the rest of Alaska.

This is the eastern shore of Beringia. During the ice ages, when sea levels fell, a broad plain joined Alaska to Siberia, and people crossed into the Americas over it or along its coast. The Bering Land Bridge National Preserve, on the north coast between Shishmaref and Kotzebue Sound, protects cave sites and beach ridges that record some of those crossings. The Inupiat still live in the villages at the edges of this map; Shishmaref sits on a thin barrier island that the sea is slowly taking, and the cliffside village of Ukivok, on King Island, was abandoned in the last century when its people moved to Nome. In 1899 gold was found on the beaches at Nome, and the rusting dredges of the rush are still out on the tundra.

The wildlife is a meeting of two continents. Muskoxen, hunted out of Alaska in the nineteenth century, were brought back and now graze these valleys again. Birds that winter in Asia and Africa nest here in summer, among them the bluethroat, the Arctic warbler and the northern wheatear, and the uplands of the Kougarok road are one of the few places in the world where the bristle-thighed curlew nests.

A Road Toward Siberia

I painted this map for Midnight Road to Beringia, a chapter of The Owyhee Puzzle, when I came to Nome to follow the story of an Oregon stone tool back toward the land bridge. On the tundra I came face to face with a lone muskox bull, watched a long-tailed jaeger hunt lemmings above the dunes, and drove the long inland road to Teller.