Tok's 40-Mile Air gets $45,000 contract for helicopter flights to track Yukon-Charley wolves

The National Park Service will have a helicopter on call this winter for its wolf work in Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve. The Interior Department hired 40-Mile Air of Tok for up to $45,000 in helicopter flights for the project, according to federal spending records. The contract runs from Sept. 25 through June 30, 2027.

The Park Service says it has tracked as many as 12 wolf packs in the preserve for more than 20 years, using aerial surveys in winter and wolves fitted with radio collars. The contract doesn't say how the helicopter time will be used.

Getting anywhere in the preserve takes an aircraft or a boat. There's no road into it, and the Park Service points visitors to air taxis out of Fairbanks or Tok, or to the Taylor and Steese highways and then down the Yukon River.

40-Mile Air is a regular on these jobs. It has picked up several Interior flight contracts this year, including $18,000 for fixed-wing flights for wolf and moose work in the same preserve and $30,000 for moose surveys in Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve.

Interior signed three other Alaska aviation contracts the same week, including about $78,000 to Juneau's Northstar Trekking for helicopter flights to old oil and gas wells the Bureau of Land Management is cleaning up.