Coldfoot, Alaska
Coldfoot is an unincorporated community in the Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area of Alaska, located approximately 60 miles north of the Arctic Circle on the Dalton Highway. Its official population is 10. It is notable in the context of KmikeyM as the childhood home of Mike Merrill, whose family accounted for half that count.
Geography and infrastructure
Coldfoot sits along the Dalton Highway, the supply road that parallels the Trans-Alaska Pipeline from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay. The community consists of a truck stop operated by Dick Mackey (winner of the 1978 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race), a cluster of trailers housing Department of Transportation road workers, and the Merrill family home.
Amenities were minimal. The DOT garage contained a Coke vending machine that was usually empty. The truck stop had free arcade games. There was no television reception. Radio worked only when atmospheric conditions cooperated. CB radio served as the primary communication technology.
The Merrill family
The Merrill family lived in Coldfoot from approximately 1983 to 1988, spanning Mike’s first through fifth grade years. The household consisted of five people:
- Ken (father), an Alaska State Trooper and Navy veteran
- Bev (mother), an evangelical Christian who ran the local CARES rescue squad
- Gene (older brother, one year older than Mike)
- Mike
- Curt (younger brother, three years younger than Mike)
As Merrill noted in his TEDxVienna talk: “The official population was ten, and there are five of us in my family.”
Daily life
The Merrill children were homeschooled through correspondence courses. Entertainment options were improvised. The boys watched pirated VHS tapes, with Star Wars in especially heavy rotation. They rode three-wheelers into the surrounding wilderness. Climbing the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was forbidden, which did not prevent it from happening.
A recurring pastime involved standing by the Dalton Highway and making the arm-pumping gesture to get truck drivers to honk their air horns. This childhood habit likely inspired the name of Urban Honking, the media company Merrill later co-founded in Portland.
Wildlife encounters were routine. Merrill has said he “had more interactions with moose than humans for the majority of my childhood.” The boys coaxed moose to eat through their bedroom windows. The moose ate their comic book collection.
The Florida trip
When the family visited grandparents in Florida, the Merrill boys experienced warm nighttime temperatures for the first time. They “were freaking out, running, screaming because it was so warm and pitch dark at the same time.” Growing up above the Arctic Circle, they had never encountered darkness without cold.
After Coldfoot
The family relocated to Soldotna on the Kenai Peninsula. Mike moved to Sitka for his junior year of high school, then enlisted in the US Army at 17.
Connection to KmikeyM
Merrill’s TEDx talk traces the origin of KmikeyM (the publicly traded person experiment) back to Coldfoot, framing it as a response to childhood isolation and a systematic method for ensuring connection. As he wrote in a memoir draft: “It wasn’t lonely when I was alone.”
The progression from Coldfoot to KmikeyM follows a through-line: a child in a place with ten people built an adult life around a platform that guarantees he is never making decisions alone.
References
- How I Became the World’s First Publicly Traded Person — TEDxVienna, 2021
- The Publicly Traded Human Goes NSFW — Playboy, 2017