Photos: Joe's Museum in Barrow

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Shults’ assortment of Alaska artifacts and animals includes this wolf, purchased from Woodland Taxidermy in Palmer. Gray wolves, the subspecies pictured here, along with black wolves are the most common in Alaska. The wolf can be found throughout the state’s mainland.

Over nearly four decades, Joe "The Waterman" Shults has crammed art, artifacts and animals of the Arctic into a second-story apartment. That time span pales in comparison to the pieces on display that include tools 150 to 1,800 years old, and mammoth teeth more than 10,000 years old.

It is hard to say how many rooms are filled with historic items in the small space. An L-shaped corridor leads visitors past stuffed animals, numerous pieces of baleen -- bone taken from a whale's jaw -- with Native art scrimshawed or painted on their sides, masks, tools, paintings and posters signed by famous Alaskans.

Read more: Housed in a small Barrow apartment, Joe's Museum offers glimpse of Arctic's past