"On a long arctic highway, cool wind in my hair,
Warm smell of musk ok rising up through the air..."
Ok, we all know I'm not ever going to be a song writer but the long hours, cruising at about 30mph, along the three roads that connect the town of Nome to outlying remote villages will sometimes give you a bit of time to think. This past June, I co-lead a week long tour to the Nome area with Dawn Wilson, another amazing and award winning wildlife and nature photographer. For the past couple years we have been visiting Nome and the surrounding arctic tundra environment in June to photograph baby musk ox and nesting arctic bird species under midnight sun.
This year was no different as we timed it to coincide with the days leading up to and just over the Summer equinox. What this does is allows us to have extremely long favorable photo hours as, while Nome is just below the Arctic Circle so the sun does actually set, it never sets far enough below the horizon to create even a blue hour, never mind true darkness. We end up with several hours of golden light followed by a sunset that has an afterburn glow that transitions directly into the predawn glow and then sunrise and golden hours again as the sun rises. It really is worth the switching of our sleep cycles to more of a "night" schedule to take advantage of this phenomenon as there really is nothing like it further south.
Combine that amazing low angle light for long hours with the hours that most arctic wildlife is the active in this season and you have a match made in photographer heaven. Arctic wildlife, such as moose, fox, and musk ox, have all adapted to living in a much colder climate and their larger bodies and thicker coats reflect this. Even with shedding, it can only help so much and the continued warming of the arctic means heat waves are becoming even more common, forcing wildlife to find further means of adapting and surviving abnormally high heat for this environment.
This June (2024) when Dawn and I lead our group, we experienced one of those heat waves. Nome rarely ever sees temperatures over 80°F/27°C, and yet we arrived just a few days after they broke their historic daily high record with a high of 74°F/23°C and came close to breaking a few more daily records while we were there. It was also rather dry, with little rain, while we visited. According to the Alaska Climate Research Center, June 2024 in Nome ended up being about 1.7°F warmer than usual and had almost an inch less precipitation.
For anyone who needs to see climate change in action in real time, just visit Alaska a year or two in a row and the evidence of changes become visceral.
But I digress...Due to the unseasonably warm temperatures, the majority of the wildlife was not starting to move around until later in the evening. Later than usual even, with the ptarmigan not really showing themselves until almost midnight some nights. But once they came out, they were out!
We had some really amazing musk ox encounters, finding herds off each of the three roads. This is a collection of some of my favorite images from this year.
For birds, we had the usual suspects of red-necked loons, red-throated grebe, rock and willow ptarmigans, Wilson's snipes, greater scaup, red polls, arctic terns, and many others. Our rough species count at the end of the tour was about 50 avian species. Being a photography tour, not a birding tour, this is still a really great number when it comes to variety.
One of the more unexpected encounters we had this season was that of the arctic and snowshoe hares. Frequently, as we are riding the roads, especially late at night, the male rock ptarmigans gather along the shoulders of the road as the road is elevated slightly above the tundra, giving them a good place to play look out for their nesting mates or when on the look out for a mate. This season we came across a stretch of road that had hares just everywhere! Hare Ally we dubbed it as there would be sometimes six or more scattered along less than thirty feet of road on either side. Sometimes they would hop back into the bushes, sometimes they would sprint down along the road just to stop again on the shoulder farther down, or sometime they would play chicken and dart across the road, giving us all heart attacks no matter how slow we were driving.
Several times we found a few that were willing to cooperate and not run off at the first sign of us moving about and that allowed us to capture some wonderful images of arctic and snowshoe hares. This time of year you can see how they had pretty much changed entirely back to their summer coat color of brown. We did see some that still had patches of white that needed to shed from their winter coat but those were far less cooperative.
The lack of rain did allow for more sun "set" light than we have had in previous years and allowed for more landscape photography opportunities as well. Nome this time of year is not just about the wildlife but the nature in general and the unique ecosystems we traverse are breathtaking under the long golden hours of the summer solstice.
Overall, it was another very successful tour for the Nature of Nome with beautiful light, tons (literal tons) of musk ox, and thousands of birds observed over the course of the week, never mind all the other wildlife and the cultural festivals we were able to sneak in as well. Both Dawn and I are already looking forward to seeing what 2025 will show us.
If you would like to join us in June of 2025 in Nome, you can find more information here about the tour. If you want to see even more images from this tour, check out my Nature of Nome online image gallery.
Explore the splendor of Nome, Alaska under the enchanting glow of the midnight sun and seize the opportunity to capture nature's marvels through your lens!
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