BETHEL \u2014 Federal officials are trying to find ways to lessen the possible impact of the proposed Donlin Gold mine on the historic Iditarod Trail.<\/p>\n
Dog musher Dan Seavey said the project\u2019s route for a natural gas pipeline that runs north of the Alaska Range through Jones Pass would interfere with the trail route. Seavey voiced his concerns with the proposed mine project at a meeting held by the Army Corps of Engineers on Tuesday, KYUK-AM reported.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t see any mitigation. I see selecting an alternate to the historic trail,\u201d said Seavey, who helped get the trail its National Historic Trail designation.<\/p>\n
Enric Fernadez, an environmental coordinator for Donlin Gold, said the proposed gas line route runs along the Iditarod Trail because of the geography of the region.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt offers the best geo-technical conditions to place a pipeline, which is coincidentally the reason why the Iditarod Trail is there,\u201d Fernadez said.<\/p>\n
Donlin is a major sponsor of the Iditarod.<\/p>\n
The Army Corps\u2019 Sheila Newman said she\u2019s confident a solution can be found for the project and praised Seavey for talking about his concerns.<\/p>\n
Others at the Tuesday meeting said the pipeline should benefit residents in surrounding villages and voiced concerns that it would open up remote areas to outside hunters.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey will be coming in from all over the world. It is a whole lot cheaper to drive than to fly,\u201d said David Gililak Sr. \u201cI mean we\u2019ll have a lot of traffic in that area, eventually to the point where the state will have to call it a road.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Army Corps plans to hold another meeting on the matter by early November.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BETHEL \u2014 Federal officials are trying to find ways to lessen the possible impact of the proposed Donlin Gold mine on the historic Iditarod Trail. Dog musher Dan Seavey said the project\u2019s route for a natural gas pipeline that runs north of the Alaska Range through Jones Pass would interfere with the trail route. Seavey […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-27634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27634"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27634\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27634"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=27634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}