On a clear fall day, a handful of contractors worked on what will be roughly a third of a mile of wooden boardwalk.
The new trail snakes along the northern side of Petersburg’s Mitkof Island. It’s just above the high tide line, looking out across Frederick Sound and Canada’s jagged Coast Range.
Mercer Deavours took a break from driving pilings to admire the view. He said the crew sees orcas and humpback whales almost every day.
“We've had pods of orcas come down,” he said. “The longer you stay down here, the more you see. It’s really fun.”
The boardwalk is part of an expansion of Petersburg’s City Creek Trail, which is only 800 feet long. Soon, it’ll be more than a mile of boardwalk and gravel, eight feet wide, with bridges and benches and wheelchair access.
The Petersburg Indian Association is paying for it with money from the federal Tribal Transportation Program. They get about $700,000 a year and have used the funds to pay for several trails around town.
The federal program is meant to provide safe transportation and access to tribal lands. But the Petersburg Indian Association doesn’t have its own land, so for nearly two decades it’s been working with the borough’s parks and rec department to build trails on borough land. They crisscross town, connecting the baseball fields, whaling watching park, and schools, among other things.
On a crisp, fall morning, Parks and Rec Director Stephanie Payne walked along the popular Hungry Point Trail. She passed speed walkers, dog walkers – a woman with a kitten on a leash.
“People come here, and they use these for their mental state of mind, to just come and relax,” she said. “If you look around us –” She spun in a circle, Sound of Music-style, arms outstretched “– all you see are mountains.”
Payne said Petersburg wouldn’t be the same without the trails.
“It would look tremendously different,” she said. “This is a mainstay in their lives, these trails that we have.”
She said the trails are always full of people, and some people use them every single day.
And the Petersburg Indian Association doesn’t just spend the money on trails. They’ve spent more than $10 million on projects around Petersburg in the last two decades – things like a free shuttle for seniors and those with mobility issues, new sidewalks, and upgraded culverts along the landslide-prone Mitkof Highway. They partner with the state Department of Transportation on road maintenance, and with the U.S. Forest Service on cabinrepairs.
Former Petersburg Tribal Administrator Everett Bennett said the partnerships just make sense.
“My perspective on it is that we're a tribe, and so we help each other, and so Petersburg is our community, and we help our community,” Bennett said. “So if we can help everybody, we're helping ourselves, too.”
Alaska tribes get more than $70 million from the federal Tribal Transportation Program each year. The money goes to more than 200 tribes and gets used in all sorts of ways. In Sitka, some of it goes to the tribally operated public transit system. Kotzebue’s tribe also builds trails and helps with the city’s road maintenance. In Bethel, the tribe spends the funds on markers for the network of trails between villages. It’s a lifesaving necessity when the snowdrifts obscure the way.
At the City Creek trail construction site, there’s still a lot of work to do. After the boardwalk, there will be bridges to add, and the paths will need to get topped off with smaller gravel. The logs and root wads will mostly get left in place to decay in the mossy woods.
The tribe has been planning the trail’s expansion since 2015. It’s projected to cost well over a million dollars, so they’ve been slowly saving as they worked on other projects.
Susan Harai is an engineer with Petersburg’s tribe and has been in charge of trail and infrastructure projects for nearly two decades. This project is a particular darling of hers. She said the trail will be awe inspiring because of the view.
“There will be no alders in your way,” she said. “You will walk along that boardwalk like you're walking along a sea walk.”
She said the trail will be finished by early winter.