I asked park ranger Travis Russell this week what was the main goal of the recent work along the Chilkoot River. He said, “To fix the road.”
Unfortunately, the road was never the issue at Chilkoot. The issue was people and how to protect resources there – including world-class bear-viewing and sport-fishing – amid an exponentially increasing number of visitors.
A person can’t drive the river road now without wondering what the state was thinking. Its recently completed “improvements” amount to a defeat for people, including pedestrians, sport fishermen, wildlife watchers, hikers, bikers and photographers.
Except for a 500-foot pedestrian lane on the new, asphalt surface leading to the fish weir, the work has resulted in less room along the riverbank for anglers and less room along the roadway for people.
If you’re walking on the road past the weir, you’ll be in the way of drivers. There’s no other place to be. The design of the road matches state “improvements” to the Haines Highway – a dike with a road on top.
Unfortunately at Chilkoot, the dike has no shoulder.
It’s almost as though someone at Division of Parks or the Department of Transportation said, “To hell with all the other uses out there, let’s just build a really smooth road to our campground.”
Sure there are two, new “viewing areas” off the road and they offer a safe spot out of the way of traffic to watch bears. But that’s not the way people watch bears. Bear watchers go to where the bears are and, once they spot a bear, they tend to disregard cars and anything else that gets between them and their bear.
So by reducing the size of the usable roadway, the recent work may well have increased the likelihood of a person-car collision. Also, the new, steep banks along the road increase both the risk of driving off the road and the potential for a person and bear becoming trapped in a tight and inescapable encounter.
The project created about 11 parking spaces for cars and three for tour buses, but the previous, wider and gravel road allowed many more vehicles to stop, albeit many of them on the road shoulder.
The only reason there hasn’t been an outcry over the “improvements” is because COVID-19 has kept the visitors away, most importantly Canadians who crowd the corridor in late summer and fall to fish. They will not be the happy campers we’ve counted on to fill local cash registers.
Ironically, this project was more than eight years in the planning.
Former state Rep. Bill Thomas, R-Haines, held a town hall meeting in Haines in December 2012 about changes the state could make to resolve crowding, traffic, and potential for bear maulings along the road. Some people at the meeting called for gating the road, others called for widening it, and yet others proposed a loop road, making the existing road one-way.
As far as I can remember, no one at the meeting said, “Let’s just elevate the road and pave it,” but that’s mostly what happened.
Thomas secured $1 million for Chilkoot improvements before losing office in 2013. The money was whittled down to $600,000 when the State of Alaska secured another $1.5 million, raising total project funding to $2.1 million.
With that much money, I wrote in this space in November 2018, the state could either seriously improve Chilkoot or wreck it. You can drive out to Chilkoot and decide for yourself what happened.
With less room now for pedestrians, bear-watchers and anglers, and no place for a driver spotting a bear to pull over, it appears the state’s long-term plan for crowding is to limit traffic by closing a gate it put up at the entrance to the road a few years ago.
Park Ranger Russell said he knows of no plans to use the gate to control crowds, but once the crowds arrive, there may be no choice.
But if limiting numbers of cars and people by using a gate was the state’s plan all along, why also blow $1 million or more on a narrow, paved dike?