Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in White Mountain, AK

White Mountain is a city in Nome Census Area, Alaska, on the eastern bank of the Fish River.

The 2020 census counted 185 people in White Mountain, living in 67 households, with a median age of 29.5 years and 92.4 percent of residents Alaska Native.

White Mountain is an Igalungmiut, or Fish River tribe, Inupiat village, known in Inupiaq as Nasirvik, Nachirvik, or Nachizrvik.

It is the only village on the Seward Peninsula located inland rather than on the ocean.

The community began as the Eskimo fish camp Nachirvik, meaning mountain look-out point, sustained by the resources of the Niukluk and Fish rivers.

The first non-Native structure was a warehouse built by miner Charles D. Lane to store supplies for his claim in the Council District, and a government-subsidized orphanage there became an industrial school in 1926.

A Covenant Church was built in White Mountain in 1937, a Russian Orthodox log cabin church from about 1920 still stands though no longer used, a post office opened in 1932, and the tribal government reorganized under the Indian Reorganization Act in 1939.

White Mountain was incorporated as a city on July 15, 1969, after first appearing on the 1920 census as an unincorporated village.

White Mountain is most notable as the last of three mandatory rest stops on the Iditarod, where every musher must take an eight-hour rest before the final 77-mile push to Nome.

White Mountain School, operated by the Bering Strait School District, serves students from pre-kindergarten through grade 12 in a building completed in 2009 after the high school building burned in a furnace-room fire in February 2006.