Sealed Corridor
A private memorandum wants to close 400 miles of public land to hunters — and it contains a clause that keeps the state's own wildlife agency from telling you why.
In December, seven parties signed a memorandum of understanding governing the future of the Ambler Road — a proposed 211-mile industrial corridor across Alaska's Brooks Range. The public didn't see it until February, when a records request forced its release. Buried inside is a clause that would ban hunting and fishing along the entire length of the road, and another clause that decides who's allowed to talk about that ban in public. The second clause is the more revealing of the two.
What the document actually does
The MOU was signed by NANA Regional Corporation, Doyon, K'oyitl'ots'ina, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA), the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Ambler Metals, and the U.S. Department of the Interior. Section 1.2.3 commits the state's own wildlife agency to a specific outcome before the public regulatory process has even begun:
The signing parties agree to work with the Commissioner of Fish and Game to present and support a proposal banning hunting and fishing in a two-mile-wide corridor running the entire 211-mile length of the road.
That's a controlled-use area roughly the size of a small state, negotiated in a closed room, before the Board of Game — the body legally responsible for weighing that tradeoff in public — ever opened a hearing on it.
The clause that silences the referee
Section 3.6 makes the whole agreement confidential. No party may speak about it publicly — in an email, a press release, a public meeting — without every other party's sign-off. That's ordinary for a deal between private companies. What isn't ordinary is who got an exception.
This MOU is confidential. Public statements require approval from every party — except that AIDEA alone may discuss why it supports the agreement at a public board meeting, with no one else's permission required.
Read that again with the parties in mind. AIDEA is the developer building the road. Ambler Metals is the mining company that needs it. Fish and Game is the state agency that answers to every Alaskan whose hunting access this buffer restricts. One of these three got a standing invitation to make its public case. The other two — including the one actually accountable to the public — did not.
Whose security, exactly?
The MOU frames the buffer as a security measure, tied to the same logic that gates the road at its Dalton Highway junction and restricts its airstrips to construction and emergency use. But a mine site is a fixed, fenced location. A 211-mile corridor is not the mine — it's the road to it, much of it running through country a hunter could occupy without coming anywhere near an active work site or a gate.
There is a real precedent for restricting hunting near an Alaska road, and it's worth being straight about it: the Dalton Highway Corridor Management Area already limits motorized hunting access within five miles of that road, adopted after wildlife managers saw what road access does to hunting pressure on previously roadless herds. That precedent cuts a different way than pure "security" — it suggests the Ambler buffer may really be about managing a coming surge in hunting pressure, not about guarding construction equipment.
If that's the honest rationale, it deserves to be argued as one — openly, with harvest data, in front of the Board of Game. It shouldn't arrive at the podium pre-decided by a private memorandum and dressed up as a security perimeter.
Two factions, one convenient outcome
The buffer survives the negotiating table because two very different interests land on the same answer, for different reasons.
Subsistence & tribal interests
Communities along the corridor depend on caribou, sheefish, and salmon runs the road could expose to a new wave of outside hunting pressure. Their stake is the resource itself.
AIDEA & Ambler Metals
Fewer people near an active industrial corridor means fewer trespass incidents, fewer safety claims, less controversy on a project already fighting litigation. Their stake is control and liability.
Both are legitimate interests. Neither is the general hunting public — the one party whose access is actually being traded away, and the one party that had no seat at the table where this was decided.
A state agency, contracted into silence
Set aside whether the road gets built. Set aside whether the buffer is good policy. What's left is a narrower, harder-to-dismiss problem: a public agency, funded by Alaskans and charged with managing a resource the state constitution reserves for common use, signed a contract that lets a private developer and a mining company decide when it's allowed to explain its own regulatory actions to the people it serves.
The document that would close 400 miles of public land to hunters was kept confidential for months — not because the law required it, but because the parties who benefit from silence wrote themselves the terms to keep it.
That's not a question of whether hunters win or lose an argument about wildlife management. It's a question of whether the referee is allowed to talk.
Say so at the podium.
The Board of Game holds a special meeting in Fairbanks on July 22, 2026 to consider the Ambler Road hunting buffer. Public comment is open now.
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