Living in Utqiagvik | America's Last City Before the North Pole | 4K

There is a city in the United States where, every winter, the sun sets in November and simply doesn't rise again for over two months. No road connects it to the rest of the country. And yet it may also have one of the best-funded city governments in America — funded by something almost nobody outside Alaska ever thinks about. At the very top of Alaska, further north than any other city in the United States, sits Utqiagvik — home to roughly 4,500 people, most of them Iñupiat, whose ancestors have lived in this exact spot for over 1,500 years. Each winter, the sun disappears for 65 days straight. There are no roads connecting it to anywhere else in the state. And underneath the extreme isolation and darkness sits a genuinely surprising economic story: oil money from the surrounding North Slope has made this remote Arctic city's local government one of the wealthiest, per capita, in the entire country. This is the story of a place that looks, from the outside, like the edge of the world — and functions, in ways nobody expects, like nowhere else in America.