MORE THAN JUST PARKS
PART III · WHAT IT WOULD COST CHAPTER 7 Named
The government denied this road because it couldn't find that restricting the subsistence of thirty communities was necessary. It named them. The order that reversed the denial doesn't make that finding either, and it says in its last operative sentence that two Native corporations still hold the ground. This chapter is the thirty, the finding, the 15 percent, and the split, reported at the level of the institution that holds each position.
What this chapter finds
Section 810 of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act is the part of federal law that governs subsistence on public land. Before an agency can authorise a use that would significantly restrict subsistence, it has to hold hearings in the affected communities and make three determinations. The first is that the restriction "is necessary, consistent with sound management principles for the utilization of the public lands." In June 2024 the Bureau of Land Management wrote that it couldn't.
"Specifically, the BLM is unable to determine that the significant restriction of subsistence use for 30 or more communities—30 for Alternatives A & B, 31 for Alternative C, and 34 for the cumulative case—is necessary, consistent with sound management principles for the utilization of the public lands. This would be the case even if the BLM were to adopt all reasonable mitigation measures analyzed in the Final Supplemental EIS." 2024 Record of Decision, p. 28
That sentence is the denial. The agency had a second, independent ground under general federal land law, but this one would have done the job alone. It was reached after hearings in twelve communities, Alatna, Allakaket, Ambler, Anchorage, Evansville, Fairbanks, Huslia, Kiana, Kobuk, Kotzebue, Selawik and Shungnak, where 189 people gave oral testimony, and after Talking Circle meetings in the villages. Five tribal governments were cooperating agencies on the analysis: the Alatna, Allakaket, Evansville, Huslia and Tanana councils.
Sixteen months later the President reinstated the permits under a different section of the same law, one that lets a rejected applicant appeal a transportation decision directly to the White House. His decision works through that section's own factors and orders the agencies to reissue "with only ministerial revisions." It doesn't make the Section 810 finding BLM said it couldn't make, and it doesn't claim to. Whether one section of the statute can be used to step around another is the live question in Northern Alaska Environmental Center v. Trump before Judge Sharon Gleason in Anchorage, alongside the tribal case brought by Tanana Chiefs Conference and the village councils. Neither has been decided on the merits, and the first was filed in 2020.
2024 Record of Decision, p. 27 (the three Section 810 determinations), p. 28 (the finding not made), p. 18 (the twelve hearings and the Talking Circles), p. 1 and p. 8 (cooperating agencies), p. 33 (189 oral commenters). Decision of the President, October 6, 2025, p. 25 ("only ministerial revisions"). The litigation, the statute's two sentences and the reversal in full are in The Case.
The government's finding isn't abstract. It lists them.
Alatna · Allakaket · Ambler · Anaktuvuk Pass · Bettles · Buckland · Deering · Elim · Evansville · Golovin · Hughes · Huslia · Kiana · Kivalina · Kobuk · Kotzebue · Koyuk · Noatak · Nome · Noorvik · Point Hope · Point Lay · Selawik · Shaktoolik · Shishmaref · Shungnak · Unalakleet · Wainwright · White Mountain · Wiseman
Sixty-six communities sit in the subsistence study area. Sixteen have use areas the road would cross. The reasoning on why the harm reaches so far is subtler than "the road blocks the caribou," and it repays reading, because it's the mechanism the whole finding rests on. Deflected animals stay north of the road and never reach the areas people hunt. Delayed animals move through later, "which could preclude the availability of bulls for subsistence harvest due to the timing of the rut." Disrupted groups scatter, which makes harvest harder even where animals are present. And the road bisects the travel routes hunters use to reach them.
"Delayed caribou could move through traditional hunting areas later in the year, which could preclude the availability of bulls for subsistence harvest due to the timing of the rut. Delayed animals could move through areas faster, limiting their availability for communities along migratory routes." 2024 Record of Decision, p. 19
2024 Record of Decision, p. 18 (the thirty, named; "delay and deflect"), p. 19 (the rut), p. 16 ("bisect travel routes used by hunters"; 66 communities in the study area, 16 with use areas overlapping the alternatives), p. 21 (the cumulative 34). The herd's own numbers and the government's chain of consequence are in the caribou chapter.
The record of decision has a section on environmental justice, and its finding is the sentence most people arguing about this road have never read.
"Impacts to subsistence and public health, including stress, subsistence-food insecurity, and potential exposure to toxins from the road, would disproportionately negatively affect low-income and minority populations, specifically Alaska Native villages in and near the project area that depend on the surrounding area for their subsistence lifestyle." 2024 Record of Decision, p. 17
Two pages earlier the same document names the social impacts it expects from connecting villages to a road: "escalations in crime, including the importation of drugs, alcohol, and other prohibited substances into the communities; and the potential for increased sexual violence against women." Kobuk, Shungnak and Ambler would be affected under every alternative, with a direct road connection to Kobuk. The document also lists the benefits, and this chapter does too, below. What it doesn't do is find that the benefits accrue where the harm lands: direct employment during construction "would not be expected to disproportionately accrue to low-income and minority populations," because workers come from across the state.
The same analysis put a price on one outcome. If the road were ever opened to the public and outside hunters reached the country, the modeled cost to a household in the road-connected communities is $6,900 to $10,500 a year in replaced food. That figure is conditional on public access, which the permits forbid, and it stays conditional here. The next section is about what "private" has meant before.
2024 Record of Decision, p. 17 (disproportionate effect), p. 15 (crime, drugs, alcohol, sexual violence; employment benefits), p. 24 (the cash economy), p. 27 (fiber optic, deliveries). 2024 Final SEIS, Volume 1, socioeconomics, the replacement-cost model conditioned on public access.
AIDEA promises the Ambler Road stays closed, and the Presidential decision directs it: the reissued authorisations cover "only a private industrial-access road and not a road for public access." That's a real commitment in a real document. The road this one would begin from carried the same commitment.
The Dalton Highway was built by Alyeska in 1974 as a private haul road for the pipeline, transferred to the state in 1979 and "opened to public traffic in phases," and in 1994 "the entire highway opened to the public." High Country News set down what happened in between, in one paragraph that everyone on the Koyukuk can recite in their own words:
"During the road's construction, poaching was rampant. Later, outside trophy hunters found ways to bypass road checkpoints by staking mining claims along the route for a pittance, pouring into the region to take precious moose and caribou. The caribou that Koyukuk villages relied on stopped coming, perhaps repelled by truck headlights. Eventually, despite Native opposition, the state opened the route as the Dalton Highway, enabling unprecedented public access to the lands it crossed." Sarah Gilman, High Country News, March 28, 2025
The federal record on the Ambler Road contains its own version of that history in a single sentence. The applicant's accounts call it "a controlled, private industrial access road," and the same record says it "eventually may be opened to the public." The road chapter carries both sentences.
Decision of the President, p. 20. Alaska DOT&PF, Dalton Highway history page (1974, 1979, 1994). High Country News, "A return to the fight against Alaska's Ambler Road," March 28, 2025.
About 59 percent of the route is State of Alaska land, 24 percent is federal, 15 percent belongs to Alaska Native corporations and 2 percent is other land, by the 2024 Final SEIS. The Presidential decision describes the BLM-managed share as "a small fraction" of the 211 miles, and it's the fifteen that gets the least attention of the three, because it's the fifteen that can say no.
These shares are the 2024 Final SEIS's (Vol. 1, p. 3-166), and they don't reflect the transfer of federal corridor land to the State that has followed. The review notes the State had already top-filed on Utility Corridor lands along this route (p. 3-168). In February 2026, Public Land Order 7966 revoked the federal withdrawals on about 2.1 million acres of the Dalton Utility Corridor, where the road would begin, and about 1.4 million acres were tentatively approved for the State that May; the rest is in court (Northern Alaska Environmental Center v. Burgum, order of July 24, 2026). The 12 percent BLM share counts all of that ground as federal, and neither agency has published how much of the route's BLM land is in the transferred acreage. The July 2025 conveyance to NANA, below, isn't reflected either.
The eastern end first. In 2014 the village corporation for Evansville, the community closest to the road's start, refused the route across its land, which pushed AIDEA onto ground owned by Doyon, Limited, the Interior's Alaska Native regional corporation. In October 2023 its chief executive, Aaron Shutt, wrote to AIDEA that Doyon wouldn't extend its access agreement past the following April unless AIDEA paid $2 million that Doyon was suing to recover over a North Slope oil and gas project AIDEA says has nothing to do with the road, a debt AIDEA disputes, and that the relationship had been "fraught," and that the authority's handling of a separate matter constituted "bad faith" that had "significantly damaged the relationship." About twelve miles of Doyon land sit at the road's start near Evansville. Without them the road takes a much longer route.
The western end. NANA Regional Corporation, the Iñupiat regional corporation of the Northwest Arctic, owns the land under the Bornite deposit, which Ambler Metals explores under an agreement with it, and the ground the road would cross to reach it. On May 2, 2024 its board voted to withdraw from the project, announced it May 8, and declined to renew AIDEA's surface access permit. Its own words: the decision "reflects unmet criteria, insufficient consultation, and a lack of confidence in the project's alignment with our values and community interests," and the criteria it listed included "controlled access, protection of caribou migration routes and subsistence resources, job creation and community benefits." NANA says its partnership with Ambler Metals "will remain intact," says the park's founding law "authorizes surface transportation" across the park unit, and says it will defend that access. Asked in its own FAQ whether it has "shut the door on accessing the Upper Kobuk," it answers "No" and says it "maintains its interest in potential mineral development" there if shareholders and the region find the right time and partnerships. Its position has shifted since 2019, and the case for the road carries the history.
In early December 2025 NANA, Doyon, AIDEA, Ambler Metals and others signed a memorandum of understanding. It's non-binding, the signed text hasn't been released, and the first news report was Northern Journal's, on February 6, 2026. NANA's president, John Lincoln, said it "does not constitute a final determination about the Ambler Road, its construction, or any commitments from the signatories," and a NANA executive's letter to shareholders on January 16 said it isn't a formal change of position. Doyon declined to answer questions. NANA's shareholder letter, as Northern Journal reported it, says the memorandum's terms include jobs for Indigenous shareholders, "strong subsistence protections" and limiting future road access to private and industrial use.
The Presidential decision that reinstated the permits ends its operative text on this sentence:
"Nothing in my findings, decision, or direction are intended to affect approval processes and authorizations required from non-Federal landowners in the Ambler Project corridor." Decision of the President, October 6, 2025, p. 27
About 15 percent of the route crosses land owned by NANA and Doyon, and the document that reinstated the permits says in as many words that it doesn't override what non-federal landowners must approve.
One more thing in that document, in a footnote. "In July 2025 the BLM conveyed certain of these lands to NANA Regional Corporation, Inc. as part of its Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act entitlement." Some of the BLM land on the western end of the route left federal ownership three months before the decision that reinstated the permits. Footnote 22 gives no acreage and no map.
High Country News (61, 15 and 24 percent; Evansville, 2014). KUAC, October 25, 2023, on Doyon's letter (the $2 million, "fraught," "bad faith," twelve miles). NANA Regional Corporation, withdrawal announcement of May 8, 2024, and its Ambler Access Project FAQ. Northern Journal, February 2026, on the memorandum, quoting Lincoln and the January 16 shareholder letter. Decision of the President, p. 7 and footnote 22 (the conveyance; "a small fraction"), p. 27 (the final sentence). Land ownership along the corridor, from the applicant's own attribute, is a layer on the map.
We hold signed resolutions of support from three Tribes. Allakaket and Hughes each voted to support a road only if it's "limited to access by the mining companies, local communities and residents," citing the cost of fuel, groceries and freight in villages without a road. Ruby's council voted 7 to 0 on March 4, 2024 to support the project for jobs and economic opportunity; its resolution asks for no access limits, and its preamble calls the project "a private, industrial-access road." Allakaket sits on both sides of the record: it joined Tanana Chiefs Conference's lawsuit in October 2020, and its Village Council's December 2023 resolution supports a limited-access road and says TCC "does not represent or speak for" it. Supporters, AIDEA among them, say more villages near the road back it; we count only the resolutions we hold. That case is stated in full, in its own words and without a foil, in The Case for the Road.
The other side of the record is larger and it's numbered. Tanana Chiefs Conference, whose board counts 42 member Tribes and tribal organizations, has been the lead tribal plaintiff since 2020. Between TCC, the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council, the Norton Bay Watershed Council and the villages, some 89 northern tribes and First Nations passed or supported resolutions against the road. Audubon Alaska counted 88 Indigenous governments and more than 82 percent of Alaska hearing testimony in support of the No Action alternative in the supplemental review. The BLM's own tally is 34,783 submissions from 89,898 individuals.
| The written record, 2023 to 2024 supplemental review | Count |
|---|---|
| Submissions received | 34,783 |
| Individuals who submitted written comment, counting petition signatories | 89,898 |
| People who gave oral testimony at the twelve hearings | 189 |
| Indigenous governments backing No Action | 88 |
| Tribes and First Nations with resolutions against, High Country News count | about 89 |
| Tribes with signed resolutions for | 3 |
2024 Record of Decision, p. 33 (34,783 submissions; 89,898 individuals, because eleven letters were petition-style; 189 oral commenters). Audubon Alaska, April 19, 2024 (88 governments, "more than 82%"). High Country News (about 89). Working group vote: Alaska Wildlife Alliance. "Nearly 90,000 comments" is loose; nearly 90,000 people is right.
In January 2022 Tanana Chiefs Conference was excluded from a meeting of the Ambler Road Subsistence Advisory Committee. Allakaket's delegated representatives were "ejected from the meeting, with no explanation or justification other than" the words "you are not invited," and "the Huslia tribe was also precluded from appointing its delegate to the committee." The 2019 comment periods fell during hunting and fishing seasons, and the pandemic diverted tribal capacity. On the other side of the same ledger, the supplemental process ran hearings in twelve communities, Talking Circle meetings in each of the rural ones, and government-to-government consultation, and five tribal councils served as cooperating agencies. Both are true. A piece that reports one without the other isn't reporting.
Tanana Chiefs Conference, "Tribes denied access to subsistence meetings," January 21, 2022. 2024 Record of Decision, p. 18 (hearings, Talking Circles, Appendix Q), p. 1 (cooperating agencies).
These are quoted exactly from Tanana Chiefs Conference's own releases, with the speaker's institution as TCC states it in each. TCC's releases name Julie Roberts-Hyslop's council both as the Native Village of Tanana and as the Tanana Tribal Council, which are the same body. A separate advocacy post places Frank Thompson at Tanana; TCC's own releases place him at Evansville, and we use the Tribes' own.
"The land does not belong to us... we are like the fish or the caribou. We belong to the land." Harding Sam, First Chief, Alatna, October 13, 2023
"This road could change life in our region more than any other single decision in history, and yet the people most affected by it have largely been left out." Carl Burgett, First Chief, Huslia, October 7, 2020
"While the impacts of the proposed road are substantial and unacceptable, the indirect effects of at least four large scale mines, and perhaps up to a dozen other mines, will be disastrous and unsustainable." Frank Thompson, First Chief, Evansville, November 29, 2023
"Those who live to see such times have a sacred obligation to be good ancestors." Julie Roberts, First Chief, Tanana Tribal Council, October 13, 2023
"For years we have been sounding the alarm – the salmon are no longer returning to our rivers, climate change is altering the planet. It is time for us as a human race to take responsibility for what we are leaving to future generations." Julie Roberts-Hyslop, First Chief, Native Village of Tanana, April 19, 2024
"This decision is a direct affront to the voices of Alaska Native people... It places corporate and extractive agendas over our rights, our lands, and our future. Despite this, we stand firm: we will not be silenced." Brian Ridley, Chief and Chairman, Tanana Chiefs Conference, October 24, 2025
Tanana Chiefs Conference releases of October 7, 2020, February 22, 2022, October 13, 2023, November 29, 2023, April 19, 2024 and October 24, 2025, quoted from page text; all six are in our record. The pro-road voices, including Larry Westlake of Kiana, are in The Case for the Road, on the same terms.
Ask anyone along the Kobuk or the Koyukuk what they think of the Ambler Road and you'll get a position. Ask when the caribou come, and whether they come at all, and you'll get the story. For decades every collar the state and the Park Service put on a Western Arctic caribou was fitted at Onion Portage on the Kobuk, by intercepting the animals from motorboats as they swam the river in September. The working group's 2025 record explains, in one sentence, why that stopped: "in recent years there has been both a reduction and delay of fall migration." Collaring moved to helicopters in spring. In 2024 the average fall crossing of the Kobuk came about two weeks later than the long-term average.
The villages told the government the same thing in stronger terms. In the supplemental review's own record of consultation, "the upper Kobuk River communities observed that the Western Arctic Caribou Herd are migrating to the Kobuk River up to two months later than normal, and this is already straining subsistence," and some residents of the Upper Kobuk "were concerned that if the road were built the increased delay would stop the Western Arctic Caribou Herd from coming to the Kobuk." A bull that arrives late arrives in the rut, and the record of decision says what that could mean: delay "could preclude the availability of bulls for subsistence harvest." The herd itself counted 490,000 in 2003 and 121,000 in 2025.
Western Arctic Caribou Herd Working Group, December 2025 meeting binder, NPS Arctic Network caribou monitoring report (collar deployments at Onion Portage; "reduction and delay of fall migration") and the 2024 migration crossing report (Kobuk crossing about two weeks later than the long-term average). 2024 Final SEIS, Volume 2, consultation record ("up to two months later than normal"). 2024 Record of Decision, p. 19. Herd counts: the caribou chapter.
The Kobuk runs from Walker Lake to Kotzebue Sound, and the valley has always been the east-west highway between the Bering Strait coast and the northern interior. Downriver at Onion Portage, the Park Service's own account says the site "has preserved over 10,000 years of human activity" and that "humans have lived and hunted in the Kobuk Valley for at least 12,500 years." J. Louis Giddings found it in 1961; the caribou still cross there. The supplemental review counted 305 previously recorded cultural sites in the chosen route's study area, twelve of them inside the right-of-way corridor, and its own model puts 80 to 90 percent of the study area at high or medium probability for undiscovered ones, because almost none of it has been surveyed.
The names are older than the map. In the review's own table of Indigenous place names, Walker Lake, where the Kobuk begins and where we reported from, is Taah K'ehoolaanh in Koyukon, "where there are lots of things in the water," and Qalugluktuaq in Iñupiaq, "big fish." The Wild River, which the road bridges, is Dodzen Beetno', "common loon canyon river." The proposal is to build a gravel road through a corridor that people have used on foot, by boat and by dog team for a hundred and twenty centuries.
National Park Service, "Alaska: Kobuk Valley National Park." 2024 Final SEIS, Volume 1, cultural resources (305 AHRS sites in the Alternative A study area, 12 within the corridor; the 80 to 90 percent model) and Appendix F, Table 38, place names within the project route corridors (rows 136 and 138).
The record of decision lists them and so do we. Kobuk, Shungnak, Ambler, Bettles and Evansville "would have the opportunity to connect to the Project's fiber optic cable," with e-commerce and telemedicine named, and could take commercial deliveries by road, which could lower fuel and grocery prices. The Northwest Arctic Borough and the corporation landowners would accrue taxes and fees. The counterweight is on the same pages: communities would have to build their own connections to the corridor, and the road could build "more reliance on the cash economy and shifting residents away from subsistence," with the agency unable to say whether a cultural shift over a fifty-year operating life would ever shift back. The fiscal case, which is Red Dog's royalty and a mine that runs out of developed ore in 2031, is in the case for the road at length.
2024 Record of Decision, p. 27 (fiber optic, deliveries, taxes and fees), p. 24 (the cash economy). Mine life: Teck Resources, 2025 Annual Information Form, and NANA. The memorandum: Northern Journal, February 2026.
What this chapter doesn't say
It doesn't say the Native communities oppose the road. Three Tribes voted for it in signed resolutions, and NANA's own FAQ says it hasn't shut the door on the Upper Kobuk and "maintains its interest in potential mineral development" there. It says the written and spoken record runs heavily against, and gives the counts.
It doesn't say NANA opposes the road. NANA withdrew in May 2024 and signed a non-binding memorandum in December 2025 that it says changes nothing formally. Both are reported. Anything that says one without the other is out of date.
It doesn't quote the 189 people who testified at the hearings. The transcripts sit on a federal server that blocks automated retrieval, and we haven't read them. When we have, their words go here, attributed as they gave them.
It doesn't say the road caused the caribou delay. The delay is documented before any road exists. The government's finding is that the road could make it worse.
The record names thirty: Alatna, Allakaket, Ambler, Anaktuvuk Pass, Bettles, Buckland, Deering, Elim, Evansville, Golovin, Hughes, Huslia, Kiana, Kivalina, Kobuk, Kotzebue, Koyuk, Noatak, Nome, Noorvik, Point Hope, Point Lay, Selawik, Shaktoolik, Shishmaref, Shungnak, Unalakleet, Wainwright, White Mountain and Wiseman. Thirty-four in the cumulative case.
2024 Record of Decision, p. 18.Because it was "unable to determine that the significant restriction of subsistence use for 30 or more communities" was necessary, the finding federal law requires before public land can be used that way. The Presidential decision that reinstated the permits doesn't make that finding. Whether a president can go around it is the question before the court in Anchorage, and it has never been answered.
2024 Record of Decision, pp. 27 to 28; Decision of the President, October 6, 2025.Both things are true at once. Three Tribes have signed resolutions supporting it, two of them only with limited access. High Country News counted some 89 northern tribes and First Nations that passed or supported resolutions against it, and Audubon Alaska counted 88 Indigenous governments and more than 82 percent of Alaska hearing testimony for No Action. The consultation record itself is disputed by the Tribes on the record. The Case for the Road states the supporters' side in their own documents.
2024 Final SEIS consultation record; resolutions held in the record.Fifteen percent of the route is Alaska Native corporation land. Doyon told AIDEA in 2023 it wouldn't extend its access past April 2024, and NANA withdrew in May 2024. The memorandum both signed in December 2025 is non-binding and, in NANA's words, "does not constitute a final determination." The President's order concedes it: "Nothing in my findings, decision, or direction are intended to affect approval processes and authorizations required from non-Federal landowners."
Decision of the President, October 6, 2025; NANA withdrawal release, May 8, 2024; KUAC, October 25, 2023.Every finding above is the federal government's, from the decision that denied the road and the decision that reversed it, or is the stated position of the institution that holds it, quoted from that institution. Where an advocacy source and a Tribe's own release disagree about a speaker's council, we use the Tribe's. Every document is in our record and searchable by passage.
If you live in one of the thirty, the finding about your community is at page 18 of the 2024 Record of Decision and the full evaluation is its Appendix M. Our record will pull the passage that names your village.
If you're a reporter, the July 2025 conveyance to NANA in footnote 22 has never been asked about: what acreage, where, and who initiated it. BLM Alaska's ANCSA conveyance records would answer it in an afternoon. So would a request for the December 2025 memorandum, which nobody outside the signatories has read.
