Walden Point Road: increasing access for Metlakatla.

• Author: Colby, Nicole A. Bonham
• Position: MILITARY CONSTRUCTION - Geographic overview

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It's been well more than a decade since Metlakatla community members first envisioned the benefits they could yield from a road project that would shorten their ferry link to nearby Ketchikan. Today, they are poised to realize those benefits: reliable access to health care, convenient secondary-educational opportunities for community youth, and expanded shopping and reciprocal commercial impact. All are on the immediate horizon, as the final touches occur to the ambitious Walden Point Road project on Annette Island in southern Southeast.

A LONG ROAD

For former two-term Metlakatla Indian Community Mayor Sol Atkinson, who recently retired after a 30-year history of support to the tribal council, the road has been an ever-present project for much of the community's latter history. "I've been with it for 14 years," he says. "It's great to see it completed. We worked with the (U.S. Department of Defense) to have an innovative training program. They built the road as they were learning how to construct roads. From the military and federal highway (perspective), it was a massive coordination project. But it worked."

Atkinson speaks to the road's parallel function as a training project for U.S. soldiers. Under the direction of the U.S. Department of Defense, the 15-mile road connects the town of Metlakatla, pop. 1,405 according to 2010 U.S. Census, to more eastern Annette Bay, a sheltered area on the northern tip of the island offering a calmer and shorter crossing to adjacent Revillagigedeo Island and the larger commerce center of Ketchikan. Metlakatla is located on the central western side of the Annette Island and the corresponding federal reserve, the only Native reservation in Alaska.

"As far as I am concerned, it is completed," Atkinson says. All 15 miles are paved, signs are installed and railing complete. Crews are currently working to relocate the present Alaska Marine Highway ferry terminal from its Metlakatla location to a new facility at the road's Annette Bay terminus. The result will be a much shorter, shuttlestyle run for the ferry from Annette Bay to Ketchikan, offering five runs per day instead of the current two, he says.

MILITARY-SIZED CONTRIBUTION

Since the project initiated back in the late 1990s, an estimated 360 military personnel were present on-the-ground in Metlakatla from April 1 to Sept. 30 each year. Much of the financial impact from that annual infusion of personnel and support requirements...