After decades, King Cove's road may finally be coming

After decades of fighting for it, the people of King Cove may finally get their road.

Alaska has put $18 million toward building a road between King Cove and Cold Bay — the long-sought link that residents of the small, largely Aleut community have pushed for across decades, through lawsuit after lawsuit and administration after administration. To them it has never been about convenience. It's about survival.

King Cove sits on a stormy stretch of the Alaska Peninsula where the weather routinely grounds planes and boats. When someone has a medical emergency and can't get out, the nearest lifeline is the all-weather airport at Cold Bay — close by, but unreachable without a road. Residents have long argued that people have died waiting for weather to break, and that a short gravel road through the refuge that separates the two towns would end that danger for good.

That refuge is why the fight has lasted so long. The route would cross the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, a globally significant stretch of wetlands, and for decades federal officials and conservation groups blocked the road to protect it — setting up one of Alaska's most enduring standoffs between a community's safety and the protection of wild land. King Cove has won and lost this battle more than once.

Now, with construction money actually on the table, the road is closer to real than it has been in years. It isn't a done deal — money in a plan is not asphalt on the ground — but for a community that has spent a generation asking for a way out in an emergency, it's the most concrete sign yet that the road might finally get built.