JAZMYN VENT was a kid when she first learned about the Ambler Road.

Vent, who is Koyukon Athabascan and Iñupiaq, was raised by her great-grandmother and her aunties in Huslia, a village of 300 in the vast, wild country south of the Brooks Range in northern Alaska. No roads traversed the spruce forest and boggy tundra. Rivers scrawled in great loops from the base of the mountains, writing their history across the flats in oxbow lakes and sloughs that gleamed with light. Huslia lay along one of the largest waterways, the Koyukuk. For generations, it and the region’s other major rivers had served as highways connecting the Alaska Native communities scattered in this trackless landscape to one another and to the fish camps and hunting places and berry-picking grounds where residents like Vent harvested much of their food.

Over a decade ago, Vent joined an auntie at a public meeting in Huslia’s community hall, where villagers had gathered to discuss a state proposal for a new road. Maps detailed a route that, if built, would begin northeast of Huslia from the Dalton Highway, the only major road in northern Alaska, and run more than 200 miles west, nearly to the Inupiat village of Kobuk, one of several on the Kobuk River. The so-called Ambler Access Project—led mostly by the state’s economic development arm, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, or AIDEA—would allow foreign companies to develop copper mines near Kobuk. Trucks would travel the new road up to 168 times per day, carrying ore concentrate. Once they reached the Dalton Highway, they would transport the ore south to Fairbanks, where trains would carry it to a port in south-central Alaska—a total journey of about 800 miles.

The stakes were high. The road would slice across the Koyukuk, the Kobuk, and nine other major rivers as well as thousands of streams, threatening the peoples’ supply of salmon, sheefish, and whitefish with toxic spills and sediment runoff. It would also interrupt the migratory path of the Western Arctic caribou herd—until recently, Alaska’s largest—threatening another key source of sustenance for more than 40 communities.

Vent was impressed by the elders she heard speak at the meeting. “They knew that showing up was going to help prevent this happening to our land and our animals and our water and our people,” Vent, now 24, told me.

But Vent and other opponents came to believe that the road was about more than the mines at its terminus. It would open one of the largest expanses of unbroken land left on Earth to industrial development. The new artery could be the starting point for yet more roads and mines, and perhaps ultimately allow public access to places long protected by their remoteness. “It’s about the Western world wanting to come in and take from Indigenous people,” Vent said. “Once this road opens, there’s no going back.”

THE RICH COPPER deposits marooned in what bureaucrats call the Ambler Mining District have attracted attention for decades. The military proposed a railway to reach them in the 1940s. After Alaska became a state in 1959, its government considered several other connections. None succeeded.

Some of the same elders from Koyukuk villages who spoke out against the Ambler Road—which the state began evaluating in 2011—had opposed previous plans when they were young. Now, as then, many worried that a new road would repeat the damages wrought by the Dalton. The highway was originally built as a private industrial road in the mid-1970s to serve the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline and oil fields on the North Slope. During the road’s construction, poaching was rampant. Later, outside trophy hunters found ways to bypass road checkpoints by staking mining claims along the route for a pittance, pouring into the region to take precious moose and caribou. The caribou that Koyukuk villages relied on stopped coming, perhaps repelled by truck headlights. Eventually, despite Native opposition, the state opened the route as the Dalton Highway, enabling unprecedented public access to the lands it crossed.

Since then, the fight over roads in the roadless interior has grown more complicated, with Alaska Native communities, particularly those near the Ambler Mining District, more divided than in the past. In 1971, a federal law settled Native land claims in the state by setting aside 44 million acres of ancestral territory as private land and parceling it among newly created Native corporations, to be developed for profit and with dividends distributed to tribal shareholders. The one that includes the Kobuk River villages, the powerful NANA Regional Corporation, partnered with Teck Resources in 1982 to develop the Red Dog zinc mine in Northwest Alaska and endeavored to staff it with mostly Alaska Native workers. Conventional employment was scarce in villages, and work at Red Dog helped support residents’ hybrid lifestyle, bridging a traditional land-based economy with one that runs on cash. A proposed copper mine on NANA land inside the mining district promised to bring similar opportunities to the region.

“It’s more expensive to live here in the area, and without jobs, you can’t even buy fuel to do your hunting,” Miles Cleveland Sr., who represents the Kobuk River villages of Shungnak and Ambler in the Northwest Arctic Borough Assembly, told me. In 2014, the assembly for the largely Inupiat borough, where the Ambler Mining District is located, passed a resolution supporting efforts to identify an access route.

Still, even some supporters were worried. Studies have confirmed that road infiltration greatly reduces wild food harvests in rural Alaska, perhaps because increased human access leads to a decrease in animal populations and more hunting restrictions. AIDEA promised villages that the Ambler Road would stay private, but the opening of the Dalton stood as a warning.

On the Koyukuk River, villages had more to lose. The small Native corporation for the village of Evansville, closest to the proposed road, blocked the route from its land in 2014, forcing AIDEA to seek access across lands owned by the regional Native corporation Doyon Limited instead. The governments of many villages, which function under federal law as sovereign tribes, passed their own resolutions against the project, including Evansville’s traditional council and those of downriver villages Alatna, Allakaket, and Huslia. The Tanana Chiefs Conference (TCC), a Fairbanks-based nonprofit consortium of 37 interior tribes, including those on the Koyukuk, backed them up.

The National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) also opposed the road, which would cross Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. So did the Wilderness Society, the Fairbanks-based Northern Alaska Environmental Center, Earthworks, and the tiny Brooks Range Council, founded by the proprietor of a wilderness lodge near the route. Many other groups didn’t engage deeply at first. Most of the proposed route—61 percent—would lie on state land, and another 15 percent would cross Native corporation land. Just 24 percent would cross federal public lands, including those in the Dalton Highway corridor, overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.

After Donald Trump became president in 2017, Alaska officials appointed to the new administration—and later, new governor Mike Dunleavy—kicked the BLM’s analysis and public process for the project into overdrive. At the same time, the federal government sprinted through similar processes for several other projects impacting tribal interests, including the Willow oil drilling venture on the North Slope and a liquefied natural gas pipeline along the Dalton. That challenged tribes’ ability to respond, especially since most lacked good internet. Comment periods were held during hunting and fishing seasons, when many people were out on the land. When Covid hit, TCC and the village councils had to prioritize protecting and vaccinating tribal members. In July 2020, the Trump administration authorized the Ambler Road across BLM and national park land.

But the administration’s rush led to sloppy execution, including its compliance with federal laws. The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act requires federal agencies to assess whether proposed projects will restrict subsistence uses—essentially the harvest of wild food. “They don’t know what communities rely on what subsistence resources and how much of those subsistence resources are where,” TCC’s then–general counsel Natasha Singh told me. “They just didn’t do any of it.” In October 2020, TCC and a handful of villages, including Evansville, Alatna, Allakaket, and Huslia, sued. Nine environmental groups brought a separate suit.

First Chief Harding Sam from the Alatna Village Council.

When President Joe Biden took office a few months later, there was no guarantee he’d reverse course. The Ambler Mining District contains minerals key to green technologies that his administration prioritized, and the road had some prominent Native support. The two mining companies that had partnered to develop prospects near Kobuk—Australia-based South32 and Canada-based Trilogy Metals—staked massive new mining claims outside the district on state land closer to the Dalton Highway. Soon after, South32 built a man camp by helicopter to support exploration in the headwaters of the Wild River. Nearly the entire southern toe of the Brooks Range along the proposed road corridor faced development.

ON A BRIGHT JUNE DAY in 2021, I joined Wayne Musser, along with his sons and Evansville First Chief Frank Thompson, aboard Musser’s boat and motored up the winding Koyukuk from Evansville. Musser—an Evansville Corporation board member, tribal council member, and Thompson’s cousin—had led the corporation’s effort to block AIDEA from its land. Thompson had spoken out against the road in Washington, DC.

We glided over the still-clear waters of the Wild River where they swirled into the Koyukuk. Thompson and his siblings swam here as kids. Musser and his family still hunt moose at a camp on the John River in the same area that the cousins’ ancestors hunted, within view of the proposed road route. “There’s not any part of the terrain that hasn’t had my foot, my presence,” Musser told me later. “It’s in your blood.”

Around a bend, snow-patched mountains came into view. We beached where Musser estimated the Ambler Road would span the Koyukuk, built a campfire, absorbed the quiet. An uprooted tree floated by; others scattered the sandbars like partially eaten carcasses. Wandering on soft sand among alder and lupine, I found it hard to imagine anything here besides the dynamism of the place itself. It was already changing in ways that the road would deeply exacerbate, due in part to the warming climate.

Permafrost in the region was starting to melt. Disturbance from the road’s construction could further destabilize the frozen soil, releasing potent greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and sediment and trapped minerals into waterways, which can harm fish. Meanwhile, the Western Arctic caribou population had steeply declined. The herd numbered 490,000 in 2003; by my 2021 visit, it had fallen to 188,000 and was still dropping. With snow and cold arriving later in the season, the herd’s migration was also shifting. Caribou were crossing the Kobuk River more than three weeks later on average in fall. Studies conducted on a shorter road on the coast within the herd’s range suggest that the Ambler Road would delay migration even more. Delays make hunting more challenging. And if bulls are in rut by the time they near villages, their hormone-soaked meat becomes rank and inedible.

Jazmyn Vent hangs moose meat to smoke.

Many people I met in the Arctic remembered times of abundance. In Allakaket, I heard stories of catching king salmon so big they took two people to wrestle them into the boat. Of chum salmon catches so hefty it took hours to empty a 50-foot net. Of drying racks bent under the vivid flesh of cut fish. But when I arrived, a plunge in fish returns had led the state to take the unusual step of closing the Koyukuk’s subsistence fishery for chum salmon. The king salmon fishery was closed for the latest of multiple disappointing seasons.

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During a late-night boat trip, a companion pointed out where salmon should have been washed up in piles along the banks at the Koyukuk’s confluence with Henshaw Creek, a key spawning area. Wolf tracks lined the empty sand, as if the animals had searched in vain for their accustomed bounty.

THE SALMON CRISIS galvanized Native opposition to the road. In July 2021, TCC and several tribes began a series of meetings with high-level federal officials and lawmakers. Their argument was simple: The Biden administration could defend permits that endangered key food sources, or it could undertake a supplemental environmental impact study with more rigorous tribal consultation and analysis of the road’s consequences for subsistence and cultural sites. The new Department of the Interior opted for the latter, securing a remand from the court in May 2022.

Over the next two years, BLM officials gave tribes adequate time to provide feedback on the proposed Ambler Access Project. They distributed hard copies of relevant information and visited communities, sometimes for days. TCC trained tribal members to be more effective in meetings. It also worked with scientists to draft detailed comments about impacts on caribou and salmon, pointing to recent population declines and incorporating information the first Trump administration’s study had ignored.

A grassroots movement gained ground at the local, state, and national levels, using rallies and social media to increase participation. Some plaintiffs in the 2020 tribal lawsuit joined with NPCA, the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, and a broader stable of environmental and community groups under a new banner: the Defend Brooks Range coalition. The focus was “having a unified message across very different partners and allies” and, most important, “making sure the tribes are not only at the table but at the head of the table,” said Alex Johnson, NPCA director of Arctic and Interior campaigns.

Among those allies was Fairbanks-based Native Movement, an Indigenous-led environmental- and social-justice nonprofit. Working with community organizer April Monroe, Native Movement tapped Alaska musicians Medium Build, Portugal. The Man, and Quinn Christopherson. The artists held concerts to help villagers feel heard and passed the mic to tribal activists like Jazmyn Vent onstage in DC and elsewhere to elevate their message to larger audiences. “One of our guiding principles is that if it’s not soulful, it’s not strategic,” said Native Movement executive director Enei Begaye.

Vent, by this time in college studying the impacts of the salmon decline, cofounded an Instagram account targeting the road. She, other activists, and tribal officials traveled thousands of miles to meet with lawmakers and members of the Biden administration and to speak at conferences and events. Evansville’s Chief Thompson noticed traction growing. Between TCC, the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council, Norton Bay Watershed Council, and villages, some 89 northern tribes and First Nations passed or supported resolutions against the proposed road. “When we were able to take that back this last time to DC, that was pretty powerful,” Thompson told me.

Meanwhile, prominent members of Inupiat communities along the Kobuk, including a former NANA president, published op-eds against the road. After respected leaders spoke out, more people voiced their own opposition. A new local group called Protect the Kobuk formed, and members gathered hundreds of signatures on a no-road petition, which they carried around the region by dogsled and snowmobile and on foot. They distributed “No Ambler Road” sweatshirts and signs, which offered people less-confrontational ways to stake a position. Members even went door-to-door to transcribe public comments and traveled between far-flung villages to attend meetings.

The road’s proponents also pushed their cause. Mining companies funded gatherings and dogsled races. AIDEA spent millions on “stakeholder outreach,” hosted job fairs in villages, and commissioned a subsistence advisory committee designed to address wildlife impacts. In 2023, Huslia and Allakaket pulled out of the lawsuit against the road. The following January, Allakaket passed a resolution in favor of the project in hopes of expanding employment opportunities for tribal members, ending more than 10 years of formal opposition.

But AIDEA alienated some of the most powerful players. By spring 2024, both Doyon and NANA had declined to renew agreements allowing the agency access across their land. “This decision reflects unmet criteria, insufficient consultation, and a lack of confidence in the project’s alignment with our values and community interests,” NANA stated in a press release.

The Interior Department followed soon after, declaring the Ambler Road’s impacts on subsistence resources far-reaching and unacceptable. In late June, it rescinded the project’s federal land permits.

A FEW DAYS LATER, 500 people gathered at the Chief David Salmon Tribal Hall in Fairbanks for live music and Indian tacos to celebrate the victory. “It’s important to acknowledge that it’s historic,” Monroe said. “You’re talking about some of the smallest tribes, the smallest communities in the world, facing off against some of the largest corporations in the world.”

Most knew the fight wasn’t over. Just before the Interior Department formally rejected the Ambler Road, Alaska senator Dan Sullivan had added an amendment to the Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act that would have reversed the agency’s decision. Hoping to get the provision removed before the law went to a vote, road opponents spent months meeting with staffers and lawmakers in over 100 offices, phone-banking, and circulating more petitions. By then, stopping the road had become a national priority for more organizations with lobbying firepower in DC, including Trout Unlimited, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Sierra Club. With growing support, the opposition prevailed again in December, when the amendment was pulled from the bill.

Now Trump has directed federal agencies to reinstate his previous administration’s approval of the Ambler Road. With a fierce legal battle on the horizon, the momentum and relationships that activists have built will be more important than ever. “Something that makes me feel comforted is that we have such a strong team,” Vent said. “We’ve gotten really good at organizing and coordinating and getting our voices out.”

Vent wants to keep working for her people and plans to study tribal law now that she’s done with college. When she went home to Huslia to help with a moose hunt last fall, Vent shared with others what she’d been up to. “They just told me to keep doing what I’m doing, and that they’re proud of me for representing them,” she said. “I would spend my whole life fighting this. If I needed to, I would put my life on the line to stop this road. And that’s how a lot of our community feels.”

Reporting for this story was supported by Braided River and the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT.