Emily Riedel, a classically trained opera singer, has shunned a career in that field to chase gold as one of the dredger captains around Nome on Discovery Channel’s Bering Sea Gold series. (DISCOVERY CHANNEL)
NOME IS WHERE HER HEART IS BERING SEA GOLD STAR EMILY RIEDEL CAN’T QUIT DREDGING
BY CHRIS COCOLES
A
bout the only thing Emily Riedel has in common with one Francis Albert Sinatra: they both have/had quite the singing pipes. Sinatra once famously crooned about hitting it big in the Big Apple. Riedel’s little-town blues are melting away thousands of miles west in Nome, Alaska, a place where dreams live and die in the form of gold hidden at the bottom of the Bering Sea.
If I can make it there, I’ll make it … anywhere. But can you imagine Ol’ Blue Eyes trying to do the same in old Nome? “Or maybe it’s, if I can make it here, I’ll never make it anywhere else,” Riedel deadpans. She jokes that every time she boards an Austria-bound plane for classical music-inspired cities like Vienna and Salzburg, the flight charts must be screwy because the plane always seems to end up in Nome. (She playfully blames the Discovery Channel, which chronicles Riedel’s and the other dredgers’ highs and lows on aksportingjournal.com | MAY 2016
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