Kotzebue was the real starting point for our Arctic Adventure. Kotzebue lies about 33 miles north of the Arctic Circle on a sand spit at the end of the Baldwin Peninsula. Kotzebue Sound is where the Noatak, Kobuk, and Selawik rivers empty into the sea. Kotzebue is on the west coast of Alaska and was a trading location for the native Alaskans for hundreds of years.

Kotzebue today has around 3,500 people with about 70% of them being Inupiat Eskimos. It is in the Northwest Arctic Borough (an Alaskan borough is like California county) and is the borough seat and largest community of the borough as well as the economic and transportation hub of the borough.

You can see most of Kotzebue in the first photo, taken from a plane on one of our flights into Kotzebue. We stayed in the Nullagvik Hotel which is the large blue and white building in the bottom center of the photo.

The next photo is from our hotel looking across town. I thought that Kotzebue looked pretty good considering its location and the weather and transportation.

We had dinner one night at Little Louie’s. One pizza was a Reindeer Pizza and was very tasty, as was the Chicken Bacon Ranch pizza. No complaints about the meal as everything was very good.

The cemetery (below) was sort of in the middle of town and just there without any boundary lines or information. I would have liked to know some history about it.

Our best visit in Kotzebue was probably the Northwest Arctic Heritage Center which is run by the National Park Service. It also serves as the Visitor Center for Kobuk Valley National Park. I included this photo instead of one from the front with a sign, just because it made something click for me about Alaskans. I heard lots of complaints about federal rules and regulations from Alaskans. I saw the signs for handicap parking and car pool parking but of course, the parking lot was empty. We were there early Friday afternoon but there were only two other people in the center, also tourists. We looked at all the displays and watched part of a movie. The center included a lot about the cultural heritage of the region.