Ruby

Ruby is an Athabascan village of 160 residents nestled in the Kilbuck-Kuskokwim Mountains, located 50 miles east of Galena and 230 miles west of Fairbanks. As is typical of Alaska’s rural communities, Ruby is in a road less area and access to the village is only by riverboat in the summer, snowmobile in the winter, or small airplanes, which are able to fly in year-round.

Ruby provides limited services and supplies to paddlers and others floating the Yukon River, and also serves as a stop along the northern route on the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. The village is also on the western border of Nowitna National Wildlife Refuge and is one of two villages, Tanana being the other, which serves as a staging area into the 1,560,000-acre preserve.

Until the mid 1800's, the only inhabitants of the area were the Koyukon Athabascans, a nomadic people who moved with the seasons in accordance to the migrations of game and fish. Ruby was established as a supply point for gold miners and was named after the red-colored stones found on the riverbank that prospectors thought were rubies. Two gold strikes fueled the growth of Ruby and at one point more than 1,000 miners lived in Ruby and the nearby creeks. Mining operations ceased during World War II and only a handful of residents remained in the village. Ruby rebounded when the residents of nearby Kokrines relocated there after the war and in 1973 incorporated as a second-class city.