King Cove is a village of under 1,000 souls, perched on a slender finger of land near the tail of the Alaskan Peninsula. Even for Alaska, this is remote wilderness, ringed by volcanic mountains and forbidding seas. In bad weather, which is much of the time, it is blanketed with fog, engulfed by whiteout snowstorms or lashed with the bitter winds off the strait. King Cove’s residents, some 70% of whom are native Aleuts, endure or embrace its isolation because of the superb commercial fishing, the sense of community and the landscape’s stark beauty. But they have found that the federal government can intrude even here, at the edge of the world.
For about three decades, the village has been fighting to build a new 11-mile, one-lane gravel track connecting King Cove to nearby Cold Bay. Cold B