20 Million Acres of National Park Lands: Threatened

In Northern Alaska, the proposed 211-mile Ambler industrial mining road could forever damage a vast roadless region and threaten America’s largest national park, Alaska Native communities, wildlife and thousands of waterways.

The threat has never been greater.

In 2024, NPCA celebrated victory with advocates in Alaska and across America, Tribes and communities around the region, when a final ruling by the Bureau of Land Management blocked the road proposal after determining its impacts were far too damaging.

Now, the Trump administration is taking unprecedented steps to ignore previous rulings and instead force the Ambler mining road forward.

The road would sever the migration route for the Western Arctic Caribou Herd and devastate a vast wilderness landscape including more than 20 million acres of national park lands and the homes of 66 Alaska Native communities.

Leading up to the 2024 decision, advocates submitted more than 116,000 comments opposing the road, and the Biden administration concluded, after an extensive analysis, that threats of irreparable harm were too great to allow the industrial road’s permits to remain in place. 

NPCA has long argued, alongside local, Tribal and national partners, that the ecological, economic and social impacts to the lands and communities of Alaska’s Brooks Range far outweighed any speculative benefits from this proposed mining project.

The state of Alaska intends to build the industrial access road along the southern Brooks Range to transport ore from open pit copper mines planned in the northwest region of the state. The road would have cost more than $1.4 billion and crossed 20 miles of Gates of the Arctic National Preserve. It would have also crossed nearly 3,000 rivers and streams, including the Kobuk Wild & Scenic River.

NPCA will continue its defense of one of the last great intact ecosystems on Earth, and work in partnership with the people who have called it home for generations.