The Alaskan Road to Nowhere is a lonely drive out in the middle of nowhere
The Road to Nowhere is the humorous nickname for the Gravina Island Highway, a gravel road located in the Gravina Islands of the Alexander Archipelago in the US state of Alaska.
The unpaved road is 3.2 miles long (5.1 km), and the speed limit is 35 mph. The highway was part of a project that would connect Ketchikan International Airport to the city of Ketchikan, the borough seat of the Ketchikan Gateway Borough. The Gravina Island Bridge, which would have connected the highway to Ketchikan, was canceled, but the highway, amid nothing but muskeg and scrub forest, was built. It features wide shoulders and sweeping curves to handle the large volume of traffic the road was expected to see one day.
Tucked away in the southeastern part of Alaska, the highway today does not pass or connect anything of importance. It’s a lonely road out in the middle of nowhere. It was built in September 2008 and would have cost US$398 million. Federal funding for the bridge disappeared, but money for the highway to the proposed bridge still came in. Instead of a bridge to an airport, residents got a new US$25 million road that dead-ends where the bridge was supposed to go: the road to nowhere. Too bad this was not a part of the stimulus fund.