On April 6, the Legislature will hold a hearing on building a private industrial road through Gates of the Arctic National Preserve to copper deposits in the Ambler Mining District. My family and I were fortunate to experience Gates of the Arctic on foot.<\/p>\n
In a 2015 backpacking trip my 11-year-old son counted 19 rodent-gnawed caribou antlers that were sinking into the mossy tundra. We hiked from the Dalton Highway over a ridge and stopped for a hot lunch of quesadillas while soaking in the expansive views of the Brooks Range that made me instantly understand why this land is this a national park and preserve, a roadless one at that.<\/p>\n
We ate blueberries until our lips and hands were stained, caught a glimpse of a wolf, climbed over remains of a landslide, forded rocky creeks, plucked a Dall sheep’s skull from a remnant snowfield and tested our new sleeping bags next to a frosty alpine lake. A treeless, tundra-covered, mountainous landscape was truly foreign to my son. My hope as a father is that my son will, like me, appreciate these wild Alaska landscapes through his experiences.<\/p>\n
In 2017, Gates of the Arctic had about 10,000 visitors and contributed $15.8 million to Alaska’s economy. Gov. Bill Walker and the Legislature should cancel the Ambler Road project. It would hurt tourism and would forever scar the nation’s second-largest national park. May the next family that hikes into the park be able to count caribou antlers and not ore trucks from a mine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On April 6, the Legislature will hold a hearing on building a private industrial road through Gates of the Arctic National Preserve to copper deposits in the Ambler Mining District. My family and I were fortunate to experience Gates of the Arctic on foot. In a 2015 backpacking trip my 11-year-old son counted 19 rodent-gnawed […]<\/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":8,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-32520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32520","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=32520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32520\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32520"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=32520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}