The Russian tanker Renda, loaded with 1.3 million gallons of fuel, finally made it to Nome over the weekend, ending a journey that began in mid-December and involved breaking through more than 300 miles of ice. It followed a path plotted and sheared out by the U.S. Coast Guard’s currently only operating Arctic icebreaker, the Cutter Healy.

Nome is in the southern Seward Peninsula coast on Norton Sound of the Bering Sea (map). The region was originally used as a hunting ground by the Inupiat settlement of Sitnasuak, but the population grew due to the discovery of gold in the late 1800s and the region’s use as an airstrip in World War