Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Bettles, AK

Bettles is a city in the Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area of Alaska, and with a 2020 census population of just 23 people it is the second smallest incorporated city in the state.

The 2020 census counted 23 residents and 10 households in Bettles, up from 12 people in 2010, and the city covers about 1.6 square miles on the southeast bank of the Koyukuk River.

Its Koyukon name is Kk'odlel T'odegheelenh Denh, and the community sits 35 miles north of the Arctic Circle, just south of the Brooks Range and near Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve.

The original village was founded a mile southwest of the junction of the John and Koyukuk Rivers in the late 1890s during the Alaska Gold Rush and was named for Gordon C. Bettles, a newspaperman, Montana silver prospector, and trader who established a trading post and community there in 1898.

A post office was established in Bettles in 1901 and continued intermittently until 1956, while residents gradually relocated 5 miles east to Evansville, where the airstrip that serves the community today was built in World War II.

The present-day city, sometimes called New Bettles, was carved out of Evansville and incorporated on December 20, 1985, after the old village was largely abandoned and its last residents left in 1997.

Bettles lies on the former Hickel Highway, which now connects to the Dalton Highway only as a winter ice road crossing the Jim River, so the city has no year-round road access.

The city is served by a 5,190-foot gravel airstrip built by the military, with Wright Air Service providing daily commercial and freight flights to and from Fairbanks, and the Vor Lake Waterlane seaplane base lies 2.5 miles south of the city.

Bettles has a subarctic climate with very long, frigid winters and short, warm summers, sitting in USDA Plant Hardiness Zone 1, where the coldest temperature of the year is typically at or below minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

Extreme temperatures in Bettles have ranged from minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit, recorded on January 4, 1975, to 93 degrees Fahrenheit on July 6, 1986, and the city averages about 91 inches of snowfall a year.