Sledge Island, 1.5 miles (2.4 km) across, lies in the Bering Sea, 5 miles (8 km) off the Seward Peninsula’s south coast, about 95 miles (153 km) southeast of Wales and 25 miles (40 km) west of Nome, Alaska. Its location has long made it a focal point of natural and human history. Like neighboring King Island, Fairway Rock, and Little Diomede in the Bering Strait, it is a granitic pluton—an intrusive igneous rock body that crystallizes slowly from cooling magma—and is highly resistant to erosion. Plutons typically form distinctive masses several kilometers across and may appear as batholiths, stocks, dikes, and sills. The island’s rugged cliffs offer nesting sites for seabirds such as kittiwakes, murres, and puffins. These birds nest on ledges, in crevices, among boulder rubble, on pinnacles or in burrows, congregating in large colonies that testify to the island’s rich ecological resources. Abundant seabirds and their eggs, together with nearby walruses and seals, attracted human settlement for millennia. Captain James Cook named the island in 1778 after a sledge found on its shore. In the early 1900s, another sled linked to a burial site was photographed by Beverly B. Dobbs. Known to the Iñupiat as Ayak, meaning ‘pushed off or detached,’ its inhabitants were called Ayakmiut or, by Europeans, Sledge Islanders. Their village clung to a steep eastern slope facing the mainland. Semi-subterranean houses, built on rocky talus at the base of a high bluff that reached the island’s summit, attest to adaptive architecture. They primarily hunted seals, walruses and occasionally whales. In 1842, Russian naval officer and explorer Lavrenty Zagoskin described the deafening roar of hundreds of walruses around his ship. Ivan Petroff occasionally conducted a census of island residents and reported 50 in 18 80 and 67 in 18 90, with 43 Native Alaskans. The census also counted Sinuk, the main village on the adjacent mainland, and two smaller settlements. In 1898, during an Arctic expedition to relieve whalers, the US Revenue Cutter Bear stopped at the island and photographed the village.

Sinuk was an ancient but small year‐round village on the east bank at the mouth of the Sinuk River, about 6.5 miles (10.5 km) north of Sledge Island. Its name, meaning ‘point’, was known to Europeans as Sinrock. The river offered access to expansive tundra reputed to provide excellent caribou pasturage, and fishing occurred in both winter and summer. Residents of Sinuk on the mainland and Ayak on Sledge Island traveled frequently between the two. Sledge Islanders visited Sinuk for fishing and berry picking in late summer; in spring, they brought crabs from Sledge Island to the mainland. Sledge Islanders, King Islanders and villagers from Wales actively traded with the Siberian Yup’ik. Alaska Athabaskans along the Yukon River traded furs to those on the Unalakleet River, who in turn traded with Norton Sound and northern Iñupiat. The Sledge Island Iñupiat served as key intermediaries in the coastal exchange of foreign goods that enriched their material culture. Sinuk was once thought to be large—a misconception stemming from its role in early reindeer herding when it served as headquarters for the first Iñupiat‐owned herd in 1895. Charlie Antesiluk built a substantial herd from an initial loan of 100 reindeer. After the herds became established, a Methodist mission and public school were founded on the river’s right bank. Antesiluk died in the 1900 measles epidemic. His widow, Changunak—known as Reindeer Mary or Sinrock Mary—continued the herding with about 500 reindeer. She moved the herd south to sell meat to the US Army at Fort Davis near Nome after gold was discovered. The gold mining industry brought diseases introduced by white miners; consequently, in 1901 Mary relocated with her family and reindeer to Unalakleet. Under her management the herd grew to 1,500 at its peak, making her one of the richest women in Alaska. In 1918 an influenza epidemic depopulated Sledge Island and Sinuk, and survivors settled in Nome.

In 1928, Henry B. Collins of the US Museum of National History collected the remains of 19 individuals and 7 funerary objects from a historic burial site on Sledge Island. The Smithsonian stored these items until they were repatriated to the Nome Eskimo Community in 2011. During World War II, Nome’s civilian airport shared a runway with Marks Army Airfield, built in 1942 to support Lend-Lease aircraft transfers to the Soviet Union and defend Alaska’s western coast. The base hosted the 404th Bombardment Squadron (28th Bombardment Group) and the 56th Fighter Squadron (54th Fighter Group). Supplying the airfield was challenging amid ice hazards and Japanese submarine patrols. On September 1, 1942, the US Maritime Commission ship SS Crown City—a 410‑foot, 5,433‑ton cargo vessel built in 1920 and crewed by 34—became stuck in ice and grounded on a reef 3 fathoms (5.5 m) deep about 1 mile (1.6 km) northeast of Sledge Island. The vessel was carrying foodstuffs, mobile machinery, Quonset huts, clothing, coal, ore, gasoline, airplane parts, and had a deck load of lumber. All of the crew survived and much of the cargo was salvaged. In 1989, a Ryan Air Cessna 402 contacted Nome flight service while arriving 15 miles (24 km) west of the airport. Advised that weather conditions were below visual flight rule minimums, the pilot was told to standby for clearance. When he failed to respond, a search began, and four days later the aircraft was found crashed on Sledge Island’s east slope at about 450 feet (137 m) elevation. The wreckage indicated that the plane, in level flight, had collided with rising terrain without any mechanical failure. Today, Sledge Island is part of the Bering Sea Unit of the Alaska Maritime Wildlife Refuge. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, merging 11 wildlife refuges and adding lands to form the world’s largest seabird refuge and the largest public‑land conservation designation in US history. Read more here and here. Explore more of Sledge Island and the Bering Sea here: