Reindeer Island is the westernmost and largest of the Midway Islands, a small group of low barrier islands in Stefansson Sound on the Beaufort Sea coast, about 200 miles (320 km) east-southeast of Utqiaġvik and 20 miles (32 km) north of Deadhorse, Alaska. Ernest Leffingwell, a geologist who surveyed the region between 1906 and 1914, named it in 1910 for the Reindeer, a whaling ship wrecked nearby in 1894. The sound is named for Vilhjalmur Stefansson, an Arctic explorer and ethnologist. The Midways belong to a chain of islands that runs west from the Canning River delta. Built mainly of sandy gravel, the islands are probably eroding remnants of a once-broad river plain, and sea ice is steadily wearing them down. Reindeer Island is migrating southwest over the buried remains of an older island, and a 1985 US Geological Survey study judged it the oldest and most nearly destroyed in the island chain.

The Iñupiat rely on wildlife for food, and bowhead whaling has sustained them for at least 1,000 years and, according to the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission, for more than 2,000. The hunt also organizes society: crews work under captains, and the meat is shared widely. Communities hunt bowheads as the whales pass in spring and fall. In spring, when pack ice is grounded against the coast as shorefast ice, hunters wait at the edge of narrow leads of open water and, when a whale is sighted, paddle skin boats into position to strike it. In fall, when there is no shorefast ice, crews in motorized skiffs search open water and chase whales until they can get close enough to strike. In recent years the pack has often been far offshore or absent. Barrier islands off the coast of Prudhoe Bay are vital for staging boats and hunting crews during the fall. The village of Nuiqsut, which hunts only in fall, has based its crews since the 1980s at Cross Island, about 11 miles (18 km) off the coast. Earlier crews used Pingok and Narwhal Islands, but a diesel winch on Cross Island, and the difficulty of coordinating crews on separate islands, drew them all to one base.

Reindeer Island was named for a 357-ton bark, 120 feet (37 m) long, built at New Bedford in 1877, registered in San Francisco and owned by James McKenna. Reindeer made two voyages in the Atlantic, nine in the Pacific and two in the Arctic, with a combined landing of 2,870 barrels of sperm oil, 5,850 barrels of whale oil and 92,800 pounds of baleen. On March 20th 1894 she sailed from San Francisco for the Arctic and her 14th season, with 38 crew under Captain Bernard Cogan. On August 4th a strong breeze and ice drove her ashore at Return Reef, at the western end of Stefansson Sound, despite a dropped anchor. Nobody died, but the vessel, valued at $24,000 and insured for $15,000, was lost. She carried only coal and casks. The crew, who had taken no whales in four months, were distributed among nearby vessels, eventually transferred to the steamer Jeanie and reached San Francisco in November, eight months after leaving and without pay. Today Reindeer Island is small, shifting and uninhabited. It is best-known as the site of a stratigraphic test well that Sohio drilled in 1979, reaching basement rock at 14,315 feet. Read more here and here. Explore more of Reindeer Island and Stefansson Sound here: