Nome, Alaska: ‘The spring water is as hot as I can bear. The effect is miraculous’
Nome, in the north-west of Alaska, is an old gold-rush metropolis peopled by workers from out of town. It’s rather splendid, and in the sweep of its town centre you get the feeling that it has hardly changed since the glory days. Huge civic buildings of yesteryear (nearly all of which have massive old gold pans outside their entrances like the trade symbols of medieval merchants) jockey with bustling engineering companies and colourful bars.
I’ve been making a circumnavigation of the Arctic Circle for a documentary. We’re reaching the end of our journey, and this is the first town the crew and I have been to that has more than two bars. It has a galvanising effect on us. We check into our hotel and head back out with unseemly haste. We discover the main activity in the bars of Nome is – weirdly – scratchcarding. People sit up at the bar in silence, industriously working their way through fistfuls of scratchcards and throwing them over their shoulders. At one place, the Polar Bar, the floor is knee-deep in discards.
Our hotel has the pleasant feeling of a coastal English guesthouse looking out over the sea. Only the sea in this case is the Bering. It’s frozen solid. When seas freeze up here, they take on pleasingly similar characteristics to those they had when unfrozen: a boiling tidal sea freezes with mountainous angry ridges and dramatic troughs, a flattish sea freezes flatly. Both, however, are marked with scary, deep cracks that you want to get over quickly if you happen to be striding out offshore.
The town of Nome, next to the frozen Bering sea. Photograph: Alamy
Up around Nome there are several hot springs, all of which have huge and historic significance for wildlife and people alike. They have been revered as supremely holy places for as long as human memory stretches back. You develop a strange animal attraction towards heat in these temperatures, and stumbling across a natural source of the stuff is still a cause for wonder. Around them, flora of all kinds spring to surprising life. This in turn brings animals, and thus a coherent little habitat evolves.
The prospectors of the early 20th century were led to the magic of the springs and overnight these sacred places of native lore were “discovered” and given names (“Pilgrim Springs!”, “Serpentine Springs!”) and bars, brothels and casinos popped up. But the rush receded and the passing trade dwindled. Today they are by and large back to their wild state on land owned by powerful Alaska Native businesses.
We take a helicopter up to Pilgrim Springs, about a 45-minute flight from Nome. The road out of town rolls on, first to its winter limit (about five miles), which is as far as the snow plough is prepared to clear between October and May. Up to this point there are several attractive houses with drives and frozen fields around them. The springs announce themselves by the presence of tall trees, among which we see tiny splodges of dark that muster then move with gathering pace. These are moose. But for the noise of the helicopter, we probably wouldn’t have spotted them, but our approach spurs them into action.
Armstrong at the hot springs with his guide. Photograph: ITV Studios
Next to the springs themselves is a group of rather well-preserved derelict buildings, including a tall chapel. We sit in the helicopter waiting for the blades to stop spinning, staring out of the windows at this extraordinary place. The atmosphere is … well, somewhat creepy. It doesn’t help that the buildings are the remnants of an abandoned orphanage. Or that the toys of the orphans – old rusty tricycles – are still peeping up through the deep snow.
We find our way into what must have been the boarding house. Upstairs the rooms are full of jumbled cots and bunkbeds for tiny people. And one’s heart breaks for the poor children who were sent here following the flu pandemic of 1918 to live under the care of a Jesuit priest and a couple of nuns. In those days the only route here was three and a half hours by train from Nome to a lonely station and then two hours by horse and cart.
I am in a fabulous state of suspension where the earth itself has taken control of me and my workings
With Kevin Bahnke, our Alaska Native guide, I wander over to the pools, admiring the fine filigree effect of the steam freezing on to the plants beside the water. We find a suitably easy pool for sloping into and I find myself stripping off in -25C temperatures. Once you have made the decision to swim in the Arctic Circle, you have to remove your clothes as fast as possible and squelch through the snow to the water’s edge. It seems impossible that a 3ft-deep expanse of water could hold its heat when spread out across that cold, cold ground. But the water is as hot as I can just about bear. We carefully inch our way into the cauldron heat until we reach that reckless point of no return and hurl ourselves fully in.
Then – and only then – do I see and feel the religious comfort of this place. The effect is miraculous. I am in some fabulous state of suspension where the earth itself has taken control of me and all my workings – all I have to do is wallow and occasionally groan at the sheer pleasure of it. I see why the shamans came here to find their divine powers. Whole neural pathways previously given over to survival can be freed up to think philosophical thoughts.
Two hotspots at Pilgrim Springs have been isolated where the temperatures are high enough to generate power that could provide free energy for a decent-sized town. Photograph: Courtesy of Chris Pike with the Alaska Center for Energy and Power
Kevin and I stay in the pool for almost an hour, talking and gently sweating as the health-giving sulphurous rill gurgles into the pool at one end and out at the other all the while. While we lightly poach ourselves, I learn that the Land Settlements for the Alaska Natives were brought into law by Richard Nixon in the 70s, having festered, unresolved, ever since Alaska became a state in 1959. Neither side seemed able to agree terms until, with the discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay in 1968 and the wafty scent of billions of petro-dollars in the air, a quick resolution needed to be found. The Federation of Natives finally agreed to keep 44m acres and to give over the rights to their other claims for just under a billion dollars, which was duly shared out between the various regional corporations, like the one Kevin works for.
Kevin also tells me about the current exploration for hydrothermal power at the springs: so far they have isolated two hotspots where the temperatures are high enough to generate power that could provide free energy for a decent-sized town. Maybe Pilgrim Springs’s biggest story is still ahead.
We drag ourselves out of the water and sit in a glorious sweaty post-bath heap that makes the gusty, tousling Arctic winds the very last word in comfort – for about four minutes. As we circle in the chopper on our way back, the whole site disappears back into its natural context, just a fold in the scrubby hills where the furious geology of the underworld makes a sudden and unexpected call.
Extracted from Land of the Midnight Sun by Alexander Armstrong, published by Bantam Press on 8 October, £18.99. To order a copy for £15.19, go to bookshop.theguardian.com. Armstrong’s three-part documentary, Land of the Midnight Sun, starts on ITV in mid-October