Every 24 minutes, a security camera at the entry gate to Dot Lake Village shakes as it captures footage of a passing 95-foot-long, 80-ton truck. This happens around the clock, 60 times a day, seven days a week. The trucks are the linchpin of a scheme by the Kinross Gold Corporation and its partners to transport ore across hundreds of miles of Alaskan highways.

The hauling operation, which began in January, is the first of its kind in Alaska. Kinross conceived the plan, in which ore from the Manh Choh gold mine, in the Yukon, is loaded onto custom-built trucks and driven 240 miles northwest to the Fort Knox open-pit gold mine outside Fairbanks. There, the ore is processed at an existing facility, avoiding the cost of building a new one at Manh Choh. Over the next five years, if all goes as planned, Manh Choh will produce an estimated 5 million ounces of gold, currently worth around $11.5 billion.

To the mining companies, the hauling operation is a matter efficiency, the use of existing assets to minimize costs. But for Alaskans, it’s yet another example of the extractive industry externalizing costs, including environmental and infrastructure damage and harms to public health and safety, while reaping big profits.

Manh Choh is at the forefront of a larger state-sanctioned embrace of a twenty-first century mining boom — part of Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s “Alaska is Open for Business” initiative and bolstered by a federal rush for cobalt, copper, and rare earth minerals for the green transition. If successful, Kinross plans to replicate the model at mines within a 300-mile radius of Fort Knox. Other companies are now following Kinross and preparing their own plans to use state highways, including the Ambler Road in the Brooks Range. The 211-mile industrial road was greenlit under the Trump administration, providing access to a $7.5-billion copper deposit buried beneath the tundra. That particular project was rejected by the Biden administration, who recently shielded 13 million acres of the North Slope from drilling and mining, including the site of the Brooks Range deposit, but these protections, however worthwhile, don’t erase the administration’s broader permissiveness. Just last year, the administration greenlit the $8 billion Willow oil drilling project in those same pristine Alaskan landscapes; it will produce an additional 600 million barrels of crude over the next thirty years — which, when burned, has the potential to put 258 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Nevertheless, Alaska’s legislature is sure to take the next presidential administration to court over Ambler Road. “There’s too much ‘no,’” Dunleavy told the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. “No trucks on the road from Tetlin to Fort Knox, no West Susitna Access Road, no Ambler Road… I need Alaska to say yes to everything.”

For those communities along the Alaska, Richardson, and Steese (ARS) highways currently used by Kinross, saying “yes to everything” means saying yes to increased traffic, maintenance costs, and safety risks. Advocates for Safe Alaska Highways (ASAH), who have been fighting the Manh Choh project since 2022, point to the harmful effects of hundreds of additional diesel-powered trucks driving through Fairbanks and North Pole, an area that is already non-compliant with the Environmental Protection Agency’s air quality standards.

ASAH representative Jon Cook attended an Alaska Department of Transportation (AKDOT) public meeting in April, where AKDOT presented a state-contracted safety analysis by the firm Kinney Engineering. The study determined that the Kinross operation would add 10 more crashes per year and an estimated 14 additional deadly or injurious crashes during the project’s five-year lifespan. Kinney also found that AKDOT will need to increase its $1.9 million annual budget along the corridor 140 to 220 percent for additional repair and maintenance caused by increased heavy-vehicle traffic.

“What AKDOT does with this beyond using some of the cost assumptions, I don’t know,” an exasperated Cook said at the meeting.

Tracy Charles-Smith, president of the Dot Lake Tribal Council, also spoke during the meeting. “This is a mess,” she said. “This is unsafe, dangerous.”

Both AKDOT and Kinross have maintained that there is no legal recourse available to stop the haul, since the loads and vehicles fall shy of the thresholds that would require permitting. It seems likely that the trucks were designed with such statutes in mind, since they were custom-built to weigh in at just beneath the limits.

Dot Lake Village, sovereign territory of the Dot Lake Tribe, lies roughly halfway between Manh Choh and Fort Knox. The Alaska Highway is the only road in or out of the village. It becomes impassable in heavy snow, and if one of the route’s numerous World War II-era bridges goes out, the only way to supply the village is by plane. (To that end, Dot Lake is looking into using sections of the road as a makeshift runway in the event of an emergency, or possibly constructing a new runway for the village, though the project is still just under discussion). The cost to improve the aged Steese Highway Bridge alone is estimated at $17.5 million, and that project has stalled due to lack of funding.

Charles-Smith and the people of Dot Lake are certain that Manh Choh is a threat to the environment and their way of life. The Manh Choh mine’s location, above the upper Tanana River and Little Chena watersheds, puts both systems at risk for potential contamination from acid mine drainage and heavy metal leaching. These contaminants come from waste rock disposal in two separate pits at the Manh Choh site near Tetlin, and the disposal of ore tailings after processing at Fort Knox. But the trucks themselves pose additional risk to all of the river crossings between Manh Choh and Fort Knox, either as a result of a trucking accident, or the spread of fugitive dust and other contaminants from the trucks themselves.

These threats represent the findings of Michael Spindler, a certified wildlife biologist for the Wildlife Society. At the request of Dot Lake Village, Spindler reviewed hundreds of pages of documents filed during a public comment period in March 2023, and while he was “impressed” with the “scientifically rigorous job of looking at the geochemistry, hydrology, and reclamation planning” that Kinross’s environmental consultants conducted, he was also “alarmed” that their work was not independently peer-reviewed, preventing the public from verifying whether or not the planned disposal methods would actually work to prevent acid mine drainage, heavy metal leaching, and water contamination. He noted that Kinross’s own reports called their methods “experimental.”

Nonetheless, Spindler noted, one could look at similar hard rock gold mines for a hint of the potential environmental impacts. In many cases, the need for monitoring, mitigation and remediation efforts will continue for centuries. This is the case at Nabesna, a once profitable gold mine not far from Manh Choh in the middle of the twentieth century, now an un-remediated site contaminated with heavy metals in the tailings and in nearby soil and water. Other similar mines, such as Donlin in Alaska and the Fortitude Mine in near Battle Mountain, Nevada, have been estimated to require two-hundred years of water treatment, possibly in perpetuity. It’s worth noting that the reports written by Kinross’s hired consultants included legal disclaimers excluding themselves from liability.

“These impacts could outlast all the people who benefitted from jobs at the mine,” Spindler wrote. “It will be their children who have to pay for cleaning it up and will live with the consequences.” In the upper Tanana and Little Chena watersheds, contamination from Manh Choh could harm the white fish who spawn in the Nabesna river, feed in Tetlin Lake in the summer, and winter down the Tanana. It would also threaten the Coho salmon run in the Tok river. Some of these fish come all the way from the Bering Sea and pass all the villages in the lower and middle Yukon before reaching the upper Tanana.

Charles-Smith also has concerns, rooted in the traumatic links between mining operations and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous People (MMIP) crisis, about the 400 workers that the project is bringing into the region. Many of them will live in an encampment in Tok. These “man camps,” as transitory housing is often referred to in the extractive industries, have historically posed unique threats to Native and rural communities. Charles-Smith worries that the influx increases the risk among the Indigenous population — and women in particular — of becoming victims of assault or trafficking. She outlined her village’s concerns In a position statement submitted during the public comment period, saying that, “ninety-six percent of Alaskan native women experience violence in their lifetime. With the lack of judicial resources, law enforcement, and adding in remote workers for a mining operation, this will create a potentially deadly situation for the many women in our region.”

When asked about the camps via email, Meadow Bailey, external affairs manager for Kinross, wrote that Kinross representatives met with community members from Tetlin, Tok, Mentasta, Northway, Healy Lake and Tanacross, and applied feedback to put in place a management system they say goes “far above and beyond what you might see at a similar facility.”

In a joint reporting venture, Alaska Public Media and Grist shed light on the many questions surrounding the permitting process for Manh Choh, which proceeded without an environmental impact statement. They’ve also covered subsequent lawsuits: one claiming violations to state transportation regulations; and another claiming that the lease between Kinross and Tetlin Native Corporation violates tribal law. And in July, Dot Lake filed its own suit, seeking improved safeguards along the route and a more in-depth environmental analysis. Among their claims, Dot Lake alleges that Kinross has stored ore on the ground, in violation of the water permit they were issued, which had been contingent on ore being loaded directly into trucks as it is mined.

“The lawsuit is about the failure of the Army Corps of Engineers to have meaningful interaction and discussions about the potential for environmental annihilation of water, fish, food, our people, our health, and (about) the failure to do an environmental impact study prior to issuing a permit,” Charles-Smith told ICT News. Kinross responded to the media organization, stating that “Manh Choh continues to operate in Interior Alaska safely and successfully. Those involved in this project have strong ties to the communities and decades of experience working in the state.”

Meanwhile, the trucks keep rolling. To date, 210,000 tons of ore have been hauled from Manh Choh to Fort Knox. With an assumed load of 50 tons per truck, that amounts to 4,200 round-way trips. Around the same time that Dot Lake filed their lawsuit, the first gold bar was minted using gold from Manh Choh.

Combined, the traffic from Manh Choh, Willow, and other major projects has caused a backlash from frustrated residents in Tok, Fairbanks, and elsewhere in the region. The first accident involving one of Kinross’s trucks occurred on April 9, when a fully-loaded northbound truck spun out and slipped onto the shoulder of the Richardson Highway as it headed up Tenderfoot Hill. Five other Kinross trucks stopped on both sides of the hill while a tow truck pulled the vehicle out.

No one was harmed, though traffic was backed up for about two hours. A spokesperson from Kinross claimed that their response plan had been carried out as expected.

Short of attempting to block the project, few solutions have been proposed to address peoples’ concerns. Alaska State Sen. Scott Kawasaki, a Democrat, has proposed a bill to require permits for trucks weighing over 140,000 pounds. The bill, however, is not likely to reduce the number of trucks, nor does Kawasaki oppose the Kinross operation. Rather, he sees it as a way to pay for the estimated $40 million in additional damage the trucks will cause. Even if the bill passes, it will fail to satisfy Charles-Smith and others who oppose the Kinross operation. The trucks, after all, aren’t the main problem. The mine is.