Bond Brothers LLC maintains a fleet of equipment for land clearing, including feller bunchers, delimbers, skidders, mulchers, horizontal grinders, log trucks, and excavators.

A Family Affair

Bond Brothers clears the way for improvements to Alaska’s roads and runways

By Jamey Bradbury

hen Kelly Bond’s sons were young, he’d occasionally take them to work with him. A single father living in Wyoming, he’d spent his life working in sawmills and skidding trees before finally starting his own logging business. Kelly’s sons, Murray and Joe, would tag along, learning their father’s businesses by observation and osmosis.

The Bond family was always close. When elder son Joe relocated to Alaska to study aviation, Murray went with him. Soon, Kelly was following his sons north.

“It seemed like it was good timing,” Kelly reflects. “I just tied up some loose ends in Wyoming, then came up later.”

In 2005, Murray and Joe launched a land-clearing company, Bond Brothers LLC. Kelly joined the business shortly thereafter. Eventually, Joe went into aviation full time, leaving Murray to run the business with Kelly.

Since then, Bond Brothers has been the go-to company for land clearing services throughout Alaska. Based in Wasilla, the father and son business clears land for projects from Cordova to Nome, throughout the Kenai Peninsula, and in the Glenallen area.

Anyone who’s headed down to Kenai for fishing or camping this summer has seen the result of Bond Brothers’ work. The company cleared every inch of land necessary for the Cooper Landing Bypass, a project that adds ten miles of new highway north of Cooper Landing, widens shoulders, and adds passing lanes, paths, and wildlife crossings.

“What Murray’s good at is, we go in and get the projects done; we don’t mess around. That way, the general [contractors] can get in there and get the work done,” says Brett Haus of Evergreen Alaska Inc., another local forest service company with whom Bond Brothers regularly works.

Bond Brothers subcontracted for various phases of the Cooper Landing Bypass project. A small company of just three employees—Kelly, Murray, and one steady part-time employee—Bond Brothers brought on several additional temporary employees to operate the company’s fleet of equipment for the Cooper Landing Bypass job.

More recently, Bond Brothers subcontracted to Kiewit for a job clearing timber for a 300-acre runway expansion on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. The project, which adds 2,500 feet to bring the runway’s total length to 10,000 feet, is one of the US Army Corps of Engineers–Alaska District’s largest and most significant military construction projects. The work Bond Brothers did on this job was part of a larger effort to move about 12 million cubic yards of material that was in the way of the extension—including a literal mountain.

For Bond Brothers, and for Kiewit, the JBER runway extension was an opportunity to create jobs and bring on additional workers. “The runway extension is a real jobs project,” says Pat Harrison, the Alaska Area manager for Kiewit Infrastructure. “We estimate this project will require over 650,000 craft-hours to complete, which translates to about 156 man-years given the construction schedule.”

Begun in 2022, the project will equip the base to accommodate any Department of Defense aircraft, regardless of weather conditions.

Though Kelly is mostly retired these days, he’s had the opportunity to work side by side with Murray on projects like the Road to Tanana, for which the company cleared about 20 miles of land destined to become an extension of Tofty Road, which extends from Manley Hot Springs to the south bank of the Yukon River. The company prepared the land for Cruz Construction to work on the project. After clearing, the Bond Brothers crew processed the birch and spruce trees into ten-foot lengths of firewood and stacked it for public use.

“That was one of my absolute favorite projects,” Kelly says of the Road to Tanana. “I really enjoy the work because you’re out there, hardly anybody to bother you, and you see all kinds of really neat country.”

Bond Brothers LLC’s contracts have taken the father-son duo all over the state, including for projects in Fairbanks, Glenallen, Cordova, and Nome.

An Associated General Contractors, or AGC, of Alaska member since 2021, Bond Brothers has benefitted from using the AGC listings to bid on jobs. “A lot of these jobs we get, they don’t necessarily call you up and invite you to bid,” Kelly says. “We have to depend on the AGC listings to keep track of what’s going on out there so we can find the jobs we want to bid on.”

Kelly spends more time in the office now, doing paperwork. When he’s needed, he still climbs into the cab of the feller buncher and helps clear land. While “the company basically belongs to Murray now,” he says, he envisions the possibility that it might be handed down to Murray’s sons one day.

“The reason I called it ‘Bond Brothers’ is because [my] boys were more interested,” he explains. “They were really involved in setting it up. And naming it that, I knew it would last longer.”