A $1.8M grant to plan safer paths near Cantwell, with two catches

A $1.8 million federal grant will begin planning walking and biking paths along a stretch of the Parks Highway near Cantwell — a corridor where residents and visitors now share narrow shoulders with speeding freight trucks and summer tourist traffic. But two questions hang over the money — who is in charge of it, and who would keep the paths clear once they exist.

The grant pays for the early work — engineering, environmental review, surveys — on a set of six "community connector" paths for Cantwell, Carlo Creek and the communities between them, recommended in a 2022 state and federal corridor study. It is planning money, not construction money; no path is funded to be built yet.

Commercial trucks make up nearly 20% of traffic on the corridor, and the volume roughly doubles in summer as visitors pour toward Denali National Park — leaving anyone on foot or a bike to travel the same narrow shoulders.

Federal records don't even agree on who administers the grant. USAspending.gov lists it as going to the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, while the U.S. Department of Transportation's own awardee list credits the Denali Borough — same dollar figure, same project name. The award came through a competitive federal pilot program that funded 49 projects nationwide from nearly 800 applications.

And once the paths exist, it is unclear who would keep them up. State documents note that DOT&PF cannot maintain a separated path, so someone else would have to — yet the grant doesn't say who would plow or maintain one through an Interior Alaska winter.