Ice Road to Nenana: unique method to transport cargo.

• Author: Friedman, Sam
• Position: TRANSPORTATION

The Yukon River city of Tanana began seeing savings from its new road well before the grand opening of the new state highway in September 2016.

This summer a triplex went up to house teachers at the Maudry J. Sommer School. The new building is what Tanana City Manager Jeff Weltzin calls a "legacy building" for the community. It's a sturdy construction with walls that are two feet thick to keep heating costs down. It's the type of project that would have been difficult before Tanana had a seasonal link to the Alaska road system.

To build the triplex, the city government shipped a Conex storage container to Fairbanks earlier this year, then had it driven more than two hundred miles over the length of the Elliott Highway and the new state road, the so-called "road to Tanana." The road ends on the south bank of the Yukon River, so to reach Tanana the Conex finished the trip by crossing a six mile village-built ice road. The shipping container weighed about fifty thousand pounds, but traveled safely over the four feet of solid ice, which is rated to handle a load nearly twice as heavy.

The price for shipping these materials to Tanana was a few thousand dollars, Weltzin says. Before the ice road and the new state highway, the cheapest option would have been barging the container from Nenana, a job that would have cost well more than $10,000.

"It's almost an order of magnitude less" he says.

Where the Rivers Meet

Most of the year one cannot drive there, so by most definitions Tanana is a bush community. But it's not very remote by Alaska standards. The village is less than an hour's Cessna flight from Fairbanks and is located near the confluence of the Yukon River and its largest tributary, the Tanana River. This major river crossroads make the village site an important location. It's the site of Nuchalayawa, a major gathering of Native Alaska people from around the Interior that was once held annually and is now held every other year.

For years Tanana residents debated whether they wanted highway access. Then-Governor Sean Parnell proposed the road in 2011 as part of his "Road's to Resources" program to link Alaska's road system with possible mine sites for gold and other natural resources.

In the town of 322 people opponents were concerned road access in the area might hurt important hunting and fishing grounds. Costs always played a large role in the "pro" side of the road debate.

Building the Ice Road

The city got to work on the ice road well...