Ky Holland, January 30, 2026 Originally published on Facebook

I’ve been digging into the history of how people traveled along upper Cook Inlet and Turnagain Arm before the railroad was finished in 1923—long before highways, guardrails, and design speeds; and when Alaska natives traded by crossing the Portage pass to reach the Arm, or gold seekers traveled by foot or horse from Seward to Sunrise, one of the largest communities in Alaska during the gold rush of 1896, and by traveled by boat from Selvovia to Glacier City (Girdwood) to mine the Crow Creek.

Back then, moving through this place meant reading tides, racing to an anchorage or river inlet to tie up before the tide dropped 40ft, dodging ice and bore tides, navigating around miles of shallow mud flats, and unpredictable weather. Travel was slower, riskier, and sometimes frustrating—but the landscape itself set the terms. You didn’t just pass through the Cook Inlet; you engaged with it.

That history has been on my mind while looking at the proposed Safer Seward Highway project:

👉 https://safersewardhighway.com

Safety matters. Reliability matters. And we’ve all seen how dangerous stretches of road can be, and struggled with being stuck for hours after an accident. At the same time, history raises a few interesting questions worth sitting with as plans move forward:

• When does improving speed and safety begin to change a place rather than simply help people move through it?
• How do we balance efficiency with maintaining connections between communities, the mountains, and the water?
• Is there a point where reducing all friction also removes some of what makes this stretch of Alaska unique?
• What lessons might earlier eras of travel—when the landscape, not the roadway, was in charge—still have for us?

This isn’t about opposing projects or romanticizing hardship. It’s about understanding the long arc of how we’ve moved through this place, and being thoughtful about what we gain—and what we might quietly lose—along the way.

I’m working on a broader history project about travel around upper Cook Inlet before modern infrastructure, and I’m always struck by how often we only recognize “overbuilding” decades later, when communities work at great cost to reconnect with their waterfronts and landscapes.

I’m curious what others think. How do you define the right balance between safety, speed, and preserving a sense of place along Turnagain Arm?

Ky