A Bridge, a Bypass, and a New Chapter for Cooper Landing

Almost anyone who has driven through the area in the summer has a tale to tell about near-misses or accidents, motorhomes crossing center lines, impatient tailgaters, or fishermen dashing across the road. Tymick says the corridor logged 303 vehicle crashes between the study period of 2000 to 2009. Thirty-six of those involved collisions with moose. Slightly more crashes (153) happened in winter as opposed to summer (150). Eighty-five involved minor injuries to occupants, twenty involved major injuries to occupants, and five were fatal crashes. Four out of the five fatalities were head-on collisions.

The new route departs from the Sterling Highway just after Mile 46, about a mile and a half before blue Kenai Lake feeds into the Kenai River. It veers north of the existing Sterling Highway, high up the Juneau Creek canyon, before angling back down to meet up with the highway again roughly a quarter-mile past Sportsman’s Landing and the Russian River Ferry. The bypass will allow traffic to maintain 55 mile-per-hour travel speeds while adding safety features for animals: four animal under-crossings and the first animal overpass in the state. A new Juneau Falls trailhead and parking lot is part of the project, as are new trail connections to Resurrection Pass and Bean Creek trails, and a new overlook area at Juneau Creek Falls just north of the new Juneau Creek bridge.

“It’s definitely one of the largest and most complex highway projects that DOT[&PF] has delivered,” Tymick says. He’s been working on the project since 2019 as design manager and stayed with it, now as construction manager.

Stage 1A, where the west end of the new road connects with what will be known as the Old Sterling Highway, was completed in 2023 by Washington-based contractor Scarsella Bros. Stage 1B, the east end connection with the Sterling Highway, is currently under construction by a joint venture of QAP and Indiana-based Traylor Bros., Inc.

The joint venture is also working on Phase 2: the design, construction, and placement of the Juneau Creek Bridge, along with construction of the pioneer roads required to access the bridge. QAP-Traylor Joint Venture completed Stages 3 and 4—establishing the middle section of the new route, along with staging and disposal sites, embankments, drainage, and construction of the wildlife undercrossings—in 2025.

After Stage 1B and Phase 2 are complete, only Stages 5 and 6 (new diamond interchange for the west-end intersection and final paving, signage, striping, rumble strips, trailheads, and landscaping) will remain. Tymick says those two stages may end up being combined, with a goal to finish the project by 2030.

Engineering Marvel

The Sterling Highway through Cooper Landing crosses the Kenai River twice and winds along the banks for much of the bypassed route. The new route will carry travelers away from the river, which Tymick says is a strong point of the design.

An incident almost 100 miles away illustrates why some distance would benefit the river. In 2021, a northbound tractor-trailer hauling 12,500 gallons of crude oil in two tankers was struck head-on by a Ford F150, resulting in the tanker rolling over and spilling about 900 gallons of crude at Mile 142 Sterling Highway, near Ninilchik. The remaining crude oil was removed from the tanker, the spilled oil was cleaned up, and the contaminated soil was excavated. Moving traffic away from the iconic Kenai River preserves and protects it from such hazards, Tymick says.

The new route opens the door to another Kenai Peninsula asset previously unseen to most: Juneau Creek Falls. Although the falls likely won’t be visible from the road, a trailhead and rest area will allow travelers to access the scenery. The trailhead will be located near the Juneau Creek Bridge, which may draw its own visitors.

Tymick says the bridge’s distinction is really the extraordinary engineering required to complete what is believed to be the longest bridge launch in North America, achieved due to engineering constraints. The canyon is part of the Sqilantnu Archaeological District, Tymick says, and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review of the project stated that crews were prohibited from working within it.

“I had hoped it meant the bridge crew couldn’t leave anything permanent in the canyon. But the NEPA document is very clear that not even temporary work is allowed to occur in the canyon,” Tymick says.

Tymick says Traylor Bros., the joint venture partner focusing on the bridge, helped select a steel girder bridge design. The bridge was fabricated and pre-assembled in Coolidge, Arizona, in 2024, so everyone knew the bolt holes would line up, reducing surprises on site. The structure was taken apart, trucked to Long Beach, California, barged to Seward in fifteen days, and hauled to the project site in spring 2025, where it was assembled again. Meanwhile, the bridge abutments and piers were built on either side of the canyon. In June 2026, the stage was set for the bridge to launch. Over the course of eight days, four ten-foot hydraulic rams pushed the bridge across the span, inch by inch.

“It was some of the most technical engineering that I’ll ever probably get to be a part of,” Tymick says.

The bridge is by no means complete; the temporary launching apparatus must be removed, abutments poured, a concrete deck poured, and much more. It will be two years before the bridge is complete, Tymick estimates.

Work elsewhere on the project continues. Much of the project is, in design terms, a mass balance project, meaning material cut from high spots is used in low spots. However, the shallow groundwater table in the region means much of the soil is saturated and unusable as fill, so material is being trucked from other stages of the project to fill in where needed. In some places, the depth of the required fill is more than eighty feet, Tymick says.

Work is progressing, but building a highway that meets modern safety standards through the Alaska wilderness is not a fast process. “This is a generational investment for the Kenai Peninsula,” he says.

New Path Reveals Area History

An environmental review of a Cooper Landing bypass began more than forty years ago—one of the longest environmental reviews in US history, state leaders said—and was finally signed by state and federal officials in 2018. Complicating the review was the project’s proximity to the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, Resurrection Pass National Recreation Trail, steep terrain, proximity to historic and cultural resource sites, and limited right of way, according to state documents.

The project is located within the traditional lands of the Dena’ina Athabascans, the Kenaitze Indian Tribe. Archaeological sites in the region indicate that people inhabited the area from the early Holocene era 8,000 years ago through present day. The Upper Kenai Peninsula shows signs of habitation stretching back to the prehistoric era, with house depressions made by Alaska Native groups tied to the Norton culture of Bristol Bay that can be traced to 1,750 to 1,850 years ago. Cultural resource consultants say the Dena’ina people displaced the Norton tradition tribes and created split-log buildings, bath houses, sweat lodges, and food caches.

Around 1850, Russian mining engineer Petr Doroshin prospected in the area but found travel prohibitive, so that effort fizzled. Following the sale of Alaska to the United States, American trappers came in, but permanent settlement didn’t happen until the 1870s, when American miners came seeking gold. Not much gold was found, but Joseph M. Cooper stayed long enough to establish a trading post at present-day Cooper Landing. Twenty years later, mining efforts were successful enough to establish the towns of Sunrise and Hope, along with a few other mines. The discovery of gold in the Klondike lured miners away, but some came back after finding Canada’s wilderness too heartbreaking.

The first road was created between Moose Pass and Cooper Landing in the 1930s. A year-round, maintained road followed in 1941 and was upgraded to a modern highway over the next decade. With it came roadhouses, gas stations, lodges, and ferry operations.

“By 1950, the Sterling Highway was a ‘modern highway,’ providing increased access to travelers along the Kenai Peninsula,” states the project’s Environmental Impact Statement. The statement notes that research for the Cooper Landing bypass, which included site surveys, testing, and excavation led to “extensive new findings, expansion of the Sqilantnu Archaeological District boundaries, identification of two areas treated as Traditional Cultural Properties, and new information about known archaeological and historic properties.”

Bypassed But Not Bygone

A bypass may satisfy road designers, creating a safer highway for humans and wildlife, but local businesses have concerns about being off the main road. Some say the benefits will likely outweigh the drawbacks, but most are concerned that maintenance funding will be spent on the new route at the expense of the Sterling Highway through Cooper Landing.

Keith and Heidi Mantey own Gwin’s Lodge and Roadhouse, which will mark seventy-five years in operation next year. Built with hand-hewn logs by Pat and Helen Gwin—who arrived in the area in 1946 with a tent and backpacks and eventually opened the roadhouse in 1952—the business was one of few that operated year-round in the area. Stories abound of the lodge and of Helen Gwin taking in travelers in winter storms or providing emergency medical care when needed. The Manteys keep those stories alive, and they still serve food based on Helen Gwin’s original recipes.

The couple says they’re confident the lodge, known around the world, is enough of a destination on its own to withstand the shift of traffic. Keith adds, “It’s potentially good to get the trucks off the road, particularly the tandem trucks. It could hurt business, but we’re hoping for the best. The river is our main attraction.”

“The Kenai River isn’t going to go anywhere. No matter what direction the road goes or what they build, I think the draw will be strong enough to carry them back,” says Heidi. “There’s a McDonald’s on every corner, but there isn’t a Gwin’s. Our goal is to keep on doing what we’ve always done, to carry on the great traditions that Helen Gwin and her husband set here seventy-four years ago.”

Cheryle James is the secretary/treasurer of Wildman TR Inc., the company behind Wildman’s convenience store in Cooper Landing. She’s also president of the Cooper Landing Chamber of Commerce. She says talk of the bypass has been around since at least the ‘80s.

“I figured I might be dead and buried before it would happen,” she says with a laugh.

James says she isn’t really in favor of the current bypass and thinks there were other routes that fit the community better. Now that the project is in full swing, she says there has been a bright side. “It’s beneficial that we have all these people in town; it’s helping out that way,” she says.

While she’s not particularly concerned that the re-route will damage her business—”I think if they want their ice cream and a sandwich, they’ll come down [into Cooper Landing],” James says—she has concerns about the chosen route and what will be done about the old Sterling Highway through Cooper Landing.

The higher elevation of the new route is likely to be an icy mess in winter, she says. But her larger concern is that the old route will receive less maintenance and repair funding. Her business and others will still need deliveries throughout the year, and businesses and residents will need fuel deliveries.

“They want these nice new roads but without any maintenance plans,” James says.

Jeff Hetrick—who with his wife, Rose, operates the Inn at Tern Lake roughly a mile from where the new road splits—agrees. He says he can see long-term benefits to the bypass, which will improve safety and ease congestion. But the condition of the existing roads should be addressed.

“The Seward and Sterling Highways are so dilapidated. We promote tourism, but we don’t provide road maintenance. We’re spending a billion dollars on a bypass and we’re not even paving our roads. There’s a lot of damage; they’re dangerous,” he says.

Tymick acknowledges that maintenance funding will be less of a priority when the Old Sterling Highway through Cooper Landing is no longer part of the highway corridor, but DOT&PF will still be responsible for maintaining it. The department is working with the Kenai Peninsula Borough to identify ways that the borough can take over maintenance on some local roads, allowing state maintenance crews to focus more resources on the highway system.

As for the condition of the Sterling Highway through Cooper Landing, Tymick notes that he will also be the construction manager for a project to resurface Miles 43–56 of the existing highway. He expects that project to advertise this fall and construction to begin in early 2027.