Brown bear cubs play with plastic markers on the newly paved Chilkoot Lake Road.
Three months after the Chilkoot River corridor improvement project finished, some Haines residents are questioning whether the new road and bear-viewing platforms are an improvement.
More than a decade in the works, the Alaska Division of Parks and Outdoor Recreation project had several aims, according to project supervisors: repair Chilkoot Lake Road’s many potholes, improve drainage, upgrade access to the lake, reduce congestion and optimize bear-viewing from safe distances. But after a summer of use, residents are still adjusting to the narrow new road, parking limitations and difficult river access.
“I don’t like the road,” said local photographer Tom Ganner. “There’s really no opportunity to pull over and stop. Maybe they’re trying to discourage use by making it so hard to use.”
Chilkoot Lake Road, which runs parallel to a short section of the Chilkoot River between Lutak Inlet and Chilkoot Lake, is famous for its bear-viewing but infamous for overcrowding. The corridor has long concerned local and state officials. In 2018, the Haines Borough Assembly issued a moratorium on new tour permits to minimize crowds.
Road construction along the river began in 2020 and finished in June. The project cost $2 million dollars, three-quarters of which came from a grant through the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act administered by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The project involved raising and paving the road, building two bear-viewing platforms, installing culverts, adding signage and designated parking spots and delineating a pedestrian walkway next to the road.
The state’s final concept plan for the corridor, which was published in 2014, included two features that ultimately weren’t built: a third bear-viewing platform and stairs connecting the road to the river for fishing access.
State employees involved with the project told the CVN that the new corridor addresses many of the concerns raised during the public feedback period but that limited funding and sensitivity to the area’s cultural heritage restricted the project. “The public process produced a master plan that was more than what we could afford,” said Rys Miranda, chief of design and construction at the Division of Parks and Outdoor Recreation.
Preston Kroes, superintendent of the Division of Parks and Outdoor Recreation’s Southeast office, said he has heard comments on the elimination of parking along the road but that the state’s intention was to eliminate only “the illegal parking that was blocking the road…and any possible emergency response, causing erosion and making it difficult to see bears coming and going from the river.”
The new road has no shoulder, fewer than 10 parking spots and one paved pull-out for non-commercial users along its entire length.
“We do realize there is a parking shortcoming out there,” Kroes said. “There was always a parking issue out there. That’s why there was so much illegal parking. Unfortunately, we only have a certain footprint we can work with.”
Kroes said the state is “looking at possible future alternatives to help with the parking in the Chilkoot area, but funding and partnerships would determine the outcome.”
Dan Egolf of Alaska Nature Tours, which ran trips at Chilkoot this summer at about a third of normal capacity due to the pandemic, said he appreciated the new pavement and a designated parking area for commercial tour buses but that “this project isn’t necessarily what we all thought it would be.”
Public meetings on the project were held eight years ago. “It would be nice for them to explain what they had in mind and how they got that from the public meetings,” Egolf said. “It always looks different in the field (than on paper), so being able to describe what their intent was would be helpful to the community and to Parks.”
Both Kroes and Miranda said the new road had to lie within the previous road’s footprint. Since the area is a native heritage site, “it is unlikely the road could have been widened, or parking expended, even if additional costly environmental and historical surveys were done,” Kroes wrote in an email to the CVN.
The old road “really was just a blob,” Miranda said, explaining that “the parking blended with the travel way. There was no designated pedestrian way. It was really hard to draw a line and say there was this much parking.” Engineers decided to elevate the road to create drainage ditches and make room for culverts. While the road might appear narrower than before, it meets national standards for local, low-volume roads, Miranda said.
Local angler Dana Perreard, who fishes on all sections of the Chilkoot River, said he’s thankful for the new road, which he called a “vast improvement.” A fly rod once popped out of the bed of his truck as it bounced over a pothole on the old road. As Ganner said, the road had “potholes the size of small states.”
Though riddled with potholes and prone to flooding, the old road was wide enough in several places for cars to park on either side. The parking was illegal, but there was little enforcement. The state added a paved walkway adjacent to the road, to reduce overcrowding in the street, but the plastic markers separating the path from the road were dismantled by brown bear cubs that seem to have interpreted the poles as play toys.
The state allocated $1 million in 2011 to build a bear-viewing platform along the corridor. It spent nearly half of that money on culture resource surveys before obtaining a federal grant of $1.5 million through the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in 2018.
“In reality, these projects are never done because they always need changes over time,” Miranda said. He added that the Division of Parks and Outdoor Recreation is not actively pursuing additional funding for work on the corridor.
If Canadian and cruise tourists visit Haines in pre-pandemic numbers next summer, the new corridor will see its first real test in 2022.