After Holidays, Nome Puts Christmas Trees on Ice

People who feel environmentally smug because they recycle their used Christmas trees into mulch have nothing on residents of Nome, Alaska. They get out their tools and build a forest.

After the holiday, residents of the wind-swept, arboreally challenged town on Norton Sound haul their trees across the beach and out onto the frozen sea, planting each one in a hole bored in the ice.

“It’s the only forest that goes out with the tides,” said Arnie Ashenfelter, a local substance abuse counselor who says he “planted” one of the first trees four years ago, partly on a dare.

About 120 evergreens dotted the ice last year, providing a bit of color in an otherwise monotonous landscape. The little forest was even inhabited by seals, walrus, reindeer and bears--made of painted plywood.

“We spread it out and make it look like a regular forest,” said Connie Madden, who helps put up the forest.

The city about 150 miles south of the Arctic Circle has next to no trees because the permafrost only thaws a few feet down each summer--too shallow for most trees to take root. Christmas trees have to be shipped in.

But with the used trees planted in the ice, there’s enough of a forest to serve as course hazard for the annual March golf tournament held to coincide with the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

Before the ice breaks up in the spring and takes the forest out to sea, high school students chop the trees down, salvaging the branches to be placed in streams as cover for newly hatched salmon.

“It’s just one of those projects the whole town took to,” Madden said.

The best part of being in on Nome’s joke is waiting to see who falls for it, like the time an out-of-town pilot flew in for the Iditarod, landed on the ice and secured his plane by tying it to a handy tree.

“One good healthy wind would have blown everything away,” Madden said.