On the roadless North Slope, the villages' winter road is made of snow

For much of the year, the only overland link between the North Slope's roadless villages is a road made of snow — trails packed across the frozen tundra of an area larger than Utah. The company that builds them just named a new leader.

UIC Oil & Gas Support, the Deadhorse logistics arm of Utqiaġvik's Iñupiat-owned corporation, builds and maintains the Community Winter Access Trail, laying more than 40,000 miles of it in five years. For landlocked villages like Atqasuk and Anaktuvuk Pass, that trail is how bulk fuel for heat and power gets in; without it, everything arrives by air, at Arctic prices.

The new general manager, Joe Barron, has a résumé that reads like the job itself: a 1,000-mile overland haul to Point Lay, an emergency winter fuel run to Anaktuvuk Pass. "The community work is the most rewarding for me, because you can see the immediate good," he said. "It keeps critical resources moving to the villages when they need it most."

But the trails cross ground that doesn't forgive. The North Slope Borough allows tundra travel only when snow cover and soil freeze run deep enough, with dates set each year by field measurements, because damage to Arctic vegetation can last decades. And the Iñupiat Community of the Arctic Slope has warned that industrial trails and traffic can disrupt caribou migration and subsistence hunting — the same subsistence the villages at the end of the trail depend on. The lifeline is boxed in by the season, and by the community it serves.