Fight expected over Alaska road

WASHINGTON – It’s only a short hop by plane from the remote Aleutian fishing outpost of King Cove to the World War II-era airfield at Cold Bay, Alaska’s third-largest airstrip.

If only the weather would cooperate, which much of the time it doesn’t. Eleven people have died on the treacherous air route since 1979.

Local villagers, searching for an overland route, have long been thwarted in their quest for a road – not by the engineering challenges of the peninsula’s mountains and wetlands, but because the 315,000-acre Izembek National Wildlife Refuge stands in the way.

This week, in what could become the nation’s next big environmental showdown, Alaska’s congressional delegation will try to break the decades-long impasse with a proposed land swap: adding more than 61,720 acres of protected wildlife habitat in exchange for a seven-mile road easement through a narrow isthmus of the Izembek refuge.

The land swap would provide the first new wilderness area in Alaska in a quarter-century.

The idea has made some inroads in the Bush administration’s Interior Department. But not with national environmental groups that hold sway in the Democratic Congress.

“Izembek has the most valuable wetlands in Alaska, if not in the United States,” said Alaska environmentalist Deborah Williams, who jousted over a road proposal with Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, a decade ago when she worked in the Clinton administration. “It would be a biological travesty to build a road there.”

But that’s exactly what the state of Alaska intends to do, working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and local governments such as the Aleutians East Borough and the city of King Cove.

Congress, which designated the wilderness in 1980, must sign off first. The debate is expected to kick off later this week when Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, introduces a bill authorizing a land trade between the federal government and the state of Alaska and the King Cove native corporation, one of more than a dozen groups that represent the business interests of Native Alaskans.

In a letter to the state’s congressional delegation in February, Gov. Sarah Palin called the road “a long-needed, safe, dependable and economic access for residents.”

Backers know the plan is controversial, but they say it’s a matter of life and death.

“This is what we’ve been fighting for for 30 years, to be able to go from King Cove to Cold Bay safely, with peace of mind, to travel like any other U.S. resident is able to do,” said Della Trumble, president of the King Cove native corporation.