White Mountain is located on the west bank of the Fish River near the head of Golovin Lagoon on the Seward Peninsula. White Mountain is 15 miles northwest of Golovin and 65 miles east of Nome. White Mountain is reached by boat, snow machine as well as scheduled and charter air service from Nome. White Mountain's population is 158. The zip code is 99784.
White Mountain is 50 feet above sea level. It has a transitional climate with less extreme temperature viriations than interior Alaska. Colder continental weather prevails during the icebound winter. Mean annual precipitation is 16 inches, with 57 inches of snow.
Winter temperatures average between -7° and 15°F; summer temperatures average between 43° and 80°F.
The airport is 1 mile north. Its elevation is 162 feet and the gravel runway is 1,900 feet in length. It is unattended. There is a passenger terminal but no public transportation into the village.
Arts and crafts available to purchase include knitted gloves and caps and porcupine quill earrings. Moorage on the beach.
The Eskimo village of Nutchirviq was located here prior to the influx of white settlers during the turn-of-the-cnetury gold rush. Bountiful fish populations in both the Fish and Niukluk rivers aupported the Native populations. In 1899, D. D. Lane erected a log waredhouse as supply headquarters for his numerous gold claims in the Counci District. The name White Mountain was derived from the color of the mountain located next to the village. White Mountain was incorporated as a second-class city in 1969.
White Mountain residents rely both on subsistence hunting and fishing, and on wages from seasonal work in commercial fishing, construction, firefighting, wood-cutting, trapping, some cannery work and reindeer heridng activities at Golovin. There are a few jobs with school, city store and airlines. Residents spend much of the summer at fish camps. The year-round diet includes lingcod, pike, whitefish, grayling, trout and skipjack. Assorted greens and roots, berries, wildfowl and squirrel are harvested in the fall; seal, moose, brown bear, reindeer, flounder, sculpin, rabbit and ptarmigan in the winter; rabbit, ptarmigan, oogruk, seal, wildgowl and eggs, and assorted roots and greens in the spring; and herring, smelt, salmon and beluga whale in the summer.
Communications include phones, mail plane, radio and TV. The community is served by a Covenant church and a school with grades kindergarten through 12. There is a community electricity system. Water is hauled from central watering points or the river. Sewage system is honey buckets. Freight arrives by barge and cargo plane.
