Steve Vick is mighty cold this week.

Vick, a resident of Haines, Alaska, is swimming the 92 sea miles from the town of Skagway to the Alaskan capital of Juneau - in protest of a proposed new road that would be built between the two towns. The "Juneau Road" would be the first road connecting the city of 30,000 with the rest of North America - but Vick, and many others, believe there are plenty of reasons the $280 million project should never be built.

A ferry ride from Juneau to Skagway, along th proposed route of the Juneau Road, reveals just how difficult, and insane, the project is. For much of the proposed road's length sheer cliffs plunge directly into the Lynn Canal, the body of water connecting Skagway and Juneau. This is prime wilderness territory, deep in the heart of the Tongass National Forest. Orca and humpback whales, porpoises, dolphins, and countless salmon swim the waters. Haines, a mountain away from Glacier Bay National Park, has the world's largest population of bald eagles; bears feast on the abundant food. The reconfiguration of land that would be necessary to attach a highway to a sheer cliff would do much to destroy this pristine habitat.

It turns out the Juneau Road isn't a good deal for motorists, either. The Alaska Dept. of Transportation estimates 61 separate avalanche zones along the route, in an area where snow clings to the mountains eight months each year. A DOT study suggested that maintenance for the road would be more expensive than simply expanding the existing public ferry service connecting the towns.

The forces behind the proposal are Alaska's fanatically pro-road Republican governor, Frank Murkowski, and Alaska's lone member of the House of Representatives, Republican Don Young, who uses his lucrative position as Chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee to earmark astounding amounts of taxpayer money for Alaskan transportation boondoggles. In a version of the Transportation Bill passed by the House in March, Young managed to extract over $720 million of earmarks for Alaskan projects, an astonishing $1,150 per state resident. (The national average is $44.)

In the face of such heavyweight political support - a new mine is also slated for an estuary along the Juneau Road's proposed route - Vick and local groups like the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council have been battling to question the need for more roads, and, in particular, this road. Alaska is an unusually rich habitat for wildlife specifically because, in the Lower 48, we've already paved or plowed over much of what was once wild. Stopping the Juneau Road is a chance to preserve one of the last remaining regions that is truly free of human interference.

Find out more at www.juneauroad.com.