Knik Tribe awarded $5 million to design fish passage fixes on Talkeetna Spur Road

Eight culverts along the Talkeetna Spur Road are blocking salmon from more than 66 miles of stream. The Knik Tribe is going to design the fix.

NOAA awarded the tribe $5,063,894 under a cooperative agreement running from October 2026 through September 2029, enough to take at least five of the eight barriers to complete design. The money pays for engineering, not construction.

Finished, the work would reopen more than 66 miles of spawning and rearing habitat and 591 acres of lake habitat for five species of wild Pacific salmon.

The project sits on customary lands of the Knik Tribe, the Native Village of Eklutna and Chickaloon Native Village, which the award record describes as relying on the area for subsistence fishing, hunting and foraging.

The Matanuska-Susitna Borough has been doing this kind of work since 2001. Under a separate program, it says it had made more than 100 culverts passable by March 2021, opening more than 66 stream miles and 6,224 lake acres.

The award record misstates two things. It says the restoration would benefit endangered beluga whales in the Gulf of Alaska; the endangered population in this drainage is NOAA's Cook Inlet stock, and these streams drain through the Susitna into Cook Inlet. It also lists Gulf of Alaska Chinook as an Endangered Species Act candidate, though NOAA concluded in May that the three Gulf of Alaska Chinook units do not warrant listing at this time.