Jims’ Landing boat ramp near the East Entrance of the Skilak Loop will be closed due to construction from March 6, 2023, until March 26, 2023.
Matt Connor, Park Ranger with the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge;
“We’re trying to reduce the impact on our visitors as well as our commercial sport fishing guides as much as possible. That’s one of the foremost things driving how we’re doing this project and so the contractor is going to be closing the launch on March 6th through the 26th for a complete closure to do some of the major work on the actual portion of the boat ramp where the public won’t be able to access it at that time and then have a partial opening for the rest of the summer working with boats coming and going so people can still continue to have fishing operations. We still have people on the river and using that facility the remainder of the summer. There might be some delays there might be some you know traffic one-way different directions as they’re doing the project, but they’re trying to do as little impact as possible to both our anglers as well as our commercial sport fishing guides in that location during that time.”
Construction will continue for most of the Spring and Summer of 2023, but the ramp will remain open after March 26, 2023.
Connor explains the work being done on site;
“We’re looking to improve the parking, one way flow of traffic in and out with parking in the middle which would be a much increased flow of traffic. So, it will speed up that process one of the things that we’ll see when Jims’ landing is backed up and busy summer months and the people are even spinning their tires and a loose gravel that’s out there all that will be improved with interlocking pavers and replaced with that. We’ve been fortunate though in the past that voters there seem to work so well together that if all the spots are occupied on the bank, coming down the river people will help grab another boat pull them in and kind of work together so lucky that spirit of Alaska there is alive and well and we’re looking to now improve that process so that the boat ramp will function more efficiently more effectively, parking is improved we won’t have a reduction of the bottlenecks here is what we want to see and just a better service for everybody’s going to use that ramp in that location.”
Connor discussed the reason for the closure and the project timeline;
“The construction project really is going to take months and months and months but, they’re going to be doing that and sacrificing that productivity to get it done quickly. Because we can’t afford to close this launch during our fishing season. We wait all year for it we would not want to close it completely down for a year or even for a couple weeks and the peak so that’s why we’re working so hard to work around this is best we can.”
Updates on the project, public meeting records and site designs are available at usfws-jims.blogspot.com.
Progress will be updated on the site regularly as construction is underway.